Best Ways to Transcribe Audio, Spring Cleaning Your PC & AT&T’s New "Landline"

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Google Assistant is going away. I'll tell you what's replacing it.
Smartwatch sales are dropping, but there's one big exception. At
and T is bringing back landlines with a modern twist.
Plus your tech questions answered. What's going on on richdmiro
and this is Rich on Tech. This is the show

(00:21):
where I talk about the tech stuff I think you
should know about. It's also the place where I answer
your questions about technology. I believe that tech should be interesting,
useful and fun. Let's open up those phone lines at
triple eight rich one oh one. That's eight eight eight
seven four to two four one zero one. Give me
a call if you have a question about technology, you

(00:42):
need a recommendation, you're looking for a website or an app,
it's all there. Eight eight eight rich one oh one
eight eight eight seven four to two four one zero one.
Email is also an option. You can just go to
the website. Rich on tech dot tv, hit contact rich
on tech dot tv, hit contact guests. This week, we've

(01:04):
got kimber Streams. They've been covering laptops and tech at
Wirecutter for over a decade and is going to share
expert tips on how to spring clean your PC and
keep it running smoothly, don't buy a new one, just
clean out the old one. And later, Jared Newman of
Advisorator writes a very good newsletter. He's going to join

(01:24):
the show to discuss the best ad blocker alternatives now
that a popular one is out, plus how to stop
those annoying sign in with Google pop ups, and he'll
talk about his quest for the perfect web browser. I
should talk about my quest for the perfect note taking app.
I'm sure we'll have something to say about that.

Speaker 2 (01:44):
Well.

Speaker 1 (01:44):
This week one of my favorite programs on Mac made
its way to Windows, and it makes transcription so much easier,
makes voice to text a lot easier. So I figured
i'd talk about some of the ways that you can
use AI and transcribing voice to text to your advantage.

Speaker 2 (02:03):
So it used to be.

Speaker 1 (02:04):
I'm sure you've heard of programs like Dragon Naturally speaking
stuff like that. Voice to text has always been a thing, right,
I mean, your phone has it, your computer has it,
but it has only worked just so well now that
AI is integrated into all of these transcription programs, it
has never been easier to not only record things and

(02:25):
transcribe them and summarize them, but also voice to text
has gotten a lot better. So of course if you
want to record something like a meeting, your phone can
do it. Pixel has a great recorder app built in,
Samsung has a voice recorder app built in, and then
iOS of course has voice memos built in.

Speaker 2 (02:45):
Now.

Speaker 1 (02:46):
Pixel Recorder was always built with AI and search in it,
so you've been able to do that for a long time.
Ever since the Pixel Recorder app came out, Samsung and
iOS they've always had a voice recorder functionality, but it
just recently got that AI upgrade where now it can
transcribe what you say or what it's hearing, and then

(03:07):
of course summarize that as well. So Pixel is the
only one that does this in real time. And so
when I go to any sort of tech event, I
pull out the Pixel smartphone and I sit it there
and I can see what the person's saying on stage.
So if I miss something, I can quickly go back
to the transcription. It's almost like close capturing in real time,
and I can see what the person said. So if

(03:28):
they're like, oh, this is our seventy fourth computer, I said, wait,
how many did they say?

Speaker 2 (03:32):
They did, oh, seventy four. So it's in real time.

Speaker 1 (03:34):
The other ones Samsung and iOS are not in real time,
but they can all make a summary with bullet points.
But you can also do it after the fact with
any audio recording. So even if you just have a
recording of audio, maybe your phone doesn't support the AI
transcriptions just yet, maybe you have an older model, older software.
You can take any audio recording, toss it into your
computer and it will transcribe.

Speaker 2 (03:55):
And these are all free.

Speaker 1 (03:57):
So on Mac I like an app called mac Whisper,
and this is sort of my secret weapon. I take
all my interviews, I toss them into mac Whisper and
it transcribes them. Now I will tell you depending on
how fast your computer is, some transcriptions take longer than others,
but most of the time it's pretty quick. If you
have like a pro, like a MacBook Pro, they're going
to be very very fast. I notice when I switch

(04:19):
to the standard MacBook Air not as fast for the transcriptions.
But still it's free and you can choose from the
models they use. So if you want to use claud,
you can use that. If you want to use open Ai,
you can use that. So just you can choose sort
of the model it uses to transcribe. Now for PC
there's an app called Vibe Transcribe. So this is an

(04:40):
open source app, Vibe Transcribe, and you download it for
your Windows computer. Again, just toss in an audio file
and this works on Mac as well. Toss in an
audio file and it will transcribe.

Speaker 3 (04:51):
It.

Speaker 1 (04:51):
Tested it today and it worked like a charm. Then
if you just want something on the web, if you
don't want to download something, there's a web app called
Whisper Web and this is machine learning powered speech recognition
right in your browser, so you can record a file
right there. You can use a URL, or you can
drop in an audio file and it will transcribe those

(05:13):
all for free, by the way, and by the way,
these transcriptions are very accurate because of AI, but they're
not always perfect. So if you're looking for perfection, you
may have to It may take longer for the transcription
because it has to listen more closely, or it has
to do a little bit more analyzing, and that's what
takes longer to make those better transcriptions. But most of

(05:33):
the time I find that even on the fast setting,
they're pretty good. Now, once you have that transcription, you
can take that and toss it into AI and get
the key takeaways or the main points. Or you can
even go back and forth and ask about what was
said in that briefing, that meeting, whatever it is that
you're recording. So think about almost programming AI. So you

(05:55):
take what the transcription does, you can toss it into
something like a chat GBT and then have a back
and forth like you're literally now talking to chat GPT
about the conversation or the meeting or whatever you recorded. Hey,
what did they say about you know, the projections for
twenty twenty six? What are they looking like? And it
will give you that information. I mean, it's really really

(06:18):
cool how you.

Speaker 2 (06:18):
Can do this stuff.

Speaker 1 (06:20):
So I always when my kids school sends out like
their zoom sort of school meeting, I will take that zoom,
I'll download it, I'll transcribe it, I'll get the key
points from AI, and then I'll paste that back into
the school's bulletin board and I'm like, hey, here's this,
here's the notes, because who wants to sit through two
hours of a parent meeting that, you know, but if
you can read the bullet points and see, oh the

(06:41):
fundraisers coming up, we raise this much money this event
is happening on this day, it's much more useful. So
this sort of unlocks more knowledge, more information for everyone.
Now some other tools that I love, and I've talked
about these before, but I'll say them again because I
really really do like these. One of them is called
voice notes, so voice note voes dot com and this

(07:01):
is sort of an AI enhanced digital notebook. So you
can speak or you can type in notes, and then
it uses AI to search through them. So think about
this almost as a second brain. So you just say stuff.
So this morning I was showing my wife. So anytime
my kid says something silly, I will record it into
this app and I'll say, oh, my kid Tanner said something.
You know, whatever he says, you know, I call him

(07:23):
tannerisms or parkerisms, and so if they say something, so
I remember it forever. And so what I did this
morning is I just asked the AI inside Voice Notes,
I said, tell me all the funny things my kid said,
and it will give you a little summary throughout all
of your notes of what your kids said that was funny.
Me and my wife are just sitting there laughing. Some
of them you forget, and some of them you remember. Instantly,

(07:43):
so that's kind of cool. And I love that they
just added a new feature recently where you don't have
to record. You can just copy and paste notes into there.
So if you want to, you know, have a note
that you whatever it is, a quote that you find
in a book or whatever you want, you can copy
and paste into Voice notes and that will go into
your sort of AI archive, and that's really cool. Whisper memos.

(08:06):
So this another one. I've talked about this probably so
many times, but I love this one. This is very similar,
but you can speak a note and this is iOS
only you can speak a note and then have it
email to yourself. So I personally love the Apple Watch
app version of this because I can be sitting there
in my car some sort of idea hits me, or
I'm listening to some sort of program or an audio

(08:29):
book and they say something interesting and I go, oh,
let me record that, and I'll record it, it'll get
transcribed and then email to me. Now, if you want
a physical solution for all this, I've been testing two
devices from PLoud Plaud.

Speaker 2 (08:43):
This is sort of an AI note taking device.

Speaker 1 (08:45):
So remember those little micro recorders we used to have
from radio shack as a kid. Well, well I did,
I was a nerd. Now they have a digital version.
And when I tell you this thing looks like a
thin credit card, it is unbelievable. They did a really
good job designing this thing. So they have two versions.
They have plawed note, which looks like a business card.
It's a digital cause I've almost said cassette recorder, digital recorder.

(09:07):
Then they have the plowed pin, which I'm wearing on
my wrist right now. And this you can wear on
your wrist, you can hang around your neck, you can
clip it to your shirt. But they both do the
same thing. They record digitally and then it goes into
the app and then it can transcribe and summarize what
it heard. And you get super long battery life thirty
hours for the note, twenty hours for the pin. Stand

(09:28):
by time last for a long time. They've got a
little way to attach the note to the back of
your phone to record phone calls. Of course, I'm no lawyer.
Check your local laws before you do that, make sure
the other party is informed. And then you get a
free plan. So when you buy this thing, you get
about three hundred minutes of transcription a month. That's five hours.
They cost about one hundred and sixty or one hundred
and seventy dollars, and my initial impressions are that they

(09:50):
work really well, and it's great if you're always in meetings,
always doing interviews, and you don't want to tie up
your phone because you might be thinking, rich, didn't you
just say I can record with my phone. Yes, I
think the idea behind these dedicated recorders is if you're
always out and about and you don't want to tie
up your phone because maybe you want to take pictures,

(10:11):
maybe you want to do something else in your phone,
scroll social media, or you just don't want it used
up the whole time you're out. So again, these are
called PLoud and it's just it's such a cool spin
on like what you can do what we did as
kids with that little recorder, that micro cassette recorder you
now have in a digital format that, by the way,
just looks really cool. And by the way, while we're

(10:32):
on the topic of voice to text, I told you
earlier my favorite voice to text app on Mac has
made its way to Windows. It is called whisper Flow
wispr flow, and I haven't like talked this up so
much because it was only on Mac. But now it
is on Windows and it is incredible. So you set
a hot key once you download install it, you set

(10:54):
a hot key on your keyboard. You press and hold
that hot key like a walkie talkie. You talk into
your microphone and your canter, and what you say is
expertly transcribed and pasted wherever you are, So if you're
in a word document, you're in chat, GBT, whatever it is.
This is my secret weapon for getting emails responded too fast.
And because it uses AI, it understands what you're saying,

(11:15):
so if you stumble, you ramble, it'll clean it up.
It gets paragraphs and punctuation right, and you get a
whole bunch of words for free every month. I haven't
even reached a free limit, but if you do more
than that, you can pay again. That's whisper flow, all right.
I'll link all this up on the website. Rich on
tech dot tv for the show notes coming up your
calls at triple eight rich one oh one. Welcome back

(11:40):
to rich on Tech. Rich Demiro here hanging out with you,
talking technology at triple eight rich one oh one eight
eight eight seven four to two four one zero one.
If you like the show, follow me on Instagram at
rich on tech. You will find me there. And uh,
if you want show notes, just go to the website

(12:00):
rich on tech dot tv. I always mentioned a lot
of helpful tips and tricks and links and programs and apps.
So if you're looking for something and you want to
find a link, it's all on the website rich on
tech dot tv. This is episode one thirteen, so just
click the little magnifying glass type in one thirteen and
that will bring you to the show notes.

Speaker 2 (12:22):
It's go to Dave in the Long Beach.

Speaker 4 (12:24):
Dave, you're on with rich Oh hi and thanks for
taking my call. Okay, I've had a cuts I've downloaded
through iTunes for years. Well some years ago I wanted
to rearrange them. I go into my library and it's empty.
I call tech Services and they tell me they're gone.

(12:49):
I'll say anything I can do, and they say, well,
can you prove you actually bought these cuts? Well they've
been there for years.

Speaker 5 (12:57):
So no way.

Speaker 2 (12:58):
Who asked you to prove you bought them?

Speaker 4 (13:01):
Customer service through iTunes?

Speaker 2 (13:04):
Really?

Speaker 4 (13:05):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (13:07):
Okay, keep going anyway?

Speaker 4 (13:09):
Is there some place I can go that these cuts
may have gone.

Speaker 1 (13:16):
To Well, when you say cuts, what do you mean
by that you had? You had your own music?

Speaker 4 (13:22):
No, okay, you know you download individual songs from iTunes
and you you know, burn into uh you know, CD,
play them in the car.

Speaker 2 (13:31):
Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 1 (13:32):
So you're saying you're looking for your music that you
previously purchased from iTunes.

Speaker 2 (13:37):
Yes, okay.

Speaker 1 (13:40):
So so the number one thing is, so why did
these disappear?

Speaker 2 (13:43):
Number one?

Speaker 4 (13:44):
Nobody seems to be able to tell me.

Speaker 2 (13:46):
Mmmm, that's interesting.

Speaker 1 (13:49):
Okay, So there is a way did you look in
the Are you using iTunes or Apple Music?

Speaker 4 (13:54):
Uh? These were originally iTunes.

Speaker 1 (13:56):
Okay, So there's a there's an option in iTunes or
Apple Music to look You're going to account and it
says purchased.

Speaker 2 (14:04):
Have you Have you looked there?

Speaker 4 (14:06):
Yep?

Speaker 2 (14:06):
And they're not there?

Speaker 4 (14:08):
Blank.

Speaker 2 (14:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (14:09):
It's weird because so is mine. I don't understand, Like,
I've purchased a whole bunch of songs over the years
and all mine are gone too, So I don't know
what what exactly happened to those. Maybe it was under
a different account, but yeah, like it's they're just not there.
You didn't have a backup of your computer backup of
this library anywhere.

Speaker 4 (14:27):
No, they've basically the backups are going to be the
cuts that are burned to CDs.

Speaker 2 (14:32):
Oh okay, do you still have them on CD?

Speaker 4 (14:35):
Yeah? I do.

Speaker 1 (14:35):
Oh well you can import those back into iTunes.

Speaker 2 (14:38):
How about that?

Speaker 4 (14:39):
Okay, I can import those back into iTunes. Now when
I burn them, you know, load them to the computer. Uh,
it just says, you know, I don't get anything that says,
you know, like the song and the artist.

Speaker 1 (14:53):
Okay, Well there is a setting inside your your well
it depends how they are encoded on the CD.

Speaker 2 (15:00):
Were they encoded with that information should have been?

Speaker 1 (15:03):
Yeah, all right, So if it has an information, there
is a setting inside Apple Music that says to look
up the information when you put in. So if you
look at the uh, let's see, it's under files and
it says import music, import settings. So I would make
sure you you know, you can do that import the
audio through that.

Speaker 2 (15:23):
And I just did this recently.

Speaker 1 (15:25):
So the only, of course requirement is that you have
to have a CD player or DVD player, which you
know a lot of computers nowadays don't, but if you
have an older model it does. But the first time
that you do this. It should ask you, hey, do
you want us to look up this information and get
the audio you know, the listings for these songs from
the internet, and so you'd have to say yes to that.

(15:45):
But once you do that, you can just import these CDs.
You basically put them in your computer. You go into
iTunes and it or Apple Music and it should show
up on the left hand side in the library. You
just write clicks a import and it it should look
up those songs as it imports them. So that's the
way I would do it. I just recently did this
the other day. It does still work. It's not as

(16:07):
heavily advertised as it used to be because people just
don't really do this as much anymore. But yes, you
can still use Apple Music to import these CDs. So
that's what I would do. But in the future, once
you do this, I would make a backup of your
iTunes music collection, so you can look on your Mac.
It's usually under music and then iTunes or under Windows

(16:31):
under same thing music iTunes, but it usually has your
username before that, so just navigate to find that library
and back up that library so you have these songs
in the future. Now, of course, we know that these
companies want us to do everything in the cloud, and
that's what they're pushing us towards. So they're not making
this easy anymore. They're not really putting these tools front
and center because they want people to just subscribe to

(16:53):
Apple Music, just subscribe to Spotify, just subscribe to whatever
music service and pay ten to twelve dollars a month
for the rest of your life for access to the
same couple songs that you play every time. So that's
unfortunately what I do and a lot of people do.
But you can still import dcds, all right. Thanks for
the call, Dave, appreciate it. You know, just in general,

(17:15):
I get a lot of emails every week about things
that go missing. Please back up your computer, back up
the important files. Just make sure, no matter what it is,
your documents, your photos, your music, back those up to
the cloud, back them up to an external hard drive.
You'll be happy you did it later. Eighty eight rich
one O one eight eight eight seven four to two

(17:37):
four one zero one. Welcome back to rich On Tech.
Rich Demiro here hanging out with you, talking technology. The
phone number eight eight eight rich one O one eight
eight eight seven four.

Speaker 2 (17:52):
To two four one zero one give me a call.

Speaker 1 (17:55):
If you have a question about technology, lines are open.
Email is also an option. Just go to Rich on
tech dot TV hit contact. That's exactly what Ray did.
Ray says, Hey, Rich, I hope you're doing well. I
wanted to see if you heard any updates about the
Google chrome Cast bug that was messing things up this week.
I'm one of the many who did a factory reset,

(18:15):
and apparently it was not the right thing to do. Ooh, Ray, Okay, yes,
this is a great segue into something I was going
to talk about. So chrome Cast this week had a
major issue. Chrome Cast second generation and chrome Cast Audio
users had a major outage. Now, given these are very

(18:39):
old devices, chrome Cast Audio and the chrome Cast second
generation have been around for a very long time, but
they still work, and you know, they're very popular. Chrome
Cast was like the way to get things to your
TV or audio for a very long time. Now we
just call it casting. It's built into a lot of things.
But anyway, they displayed this message, I said, outdated device firmware,

(19:03):
and they became unusable. And so a lot of people
like Ray said, they performed these factory resets, which, by
the way, made the issue worse. Now, if you're a
tech person and something goes wrong and you keep getting
an error message, you might think, oh, let me just
reset this and see if that's going to help. Well,
that actually messed up the device. So Google told people

(19:23):
do not factory reset, but so many people did that already.
So now Google says they do have a cause of
the problem and they are working on a fix. They
have not provided a timeline for the fix, but they
say please do not factory reset. So if your Chrome
Cast is not working, you've got one of these older
Chrome Cast devices and it's giving you some sort of error,

(19:46):
do not factory reset it. Just wait because Google says
it's going to make reset up very, very difficult. But
it does sound like they will have a fix. So
ray if you did reset it, you did that factory reset,
that they should come out with some sort of factory
software or new software that's gonna help. Now people are

(20:06):
finding these little workarounds on Reddit. I can't recommend you
do that unless you are super techy. But it is
a software issue, not a hardware issue. So these things
happen from time to time, and it's frustrating, especially with me,
because you know, I'm the kind of person that's always
doing like the software update immediately, and you know, you
run into some issue, you look online like, hey are
other people having this problem? But it's usually the people

(20:28):
like me that are doing it first. And you know,
sometimes these things don't happen longer because the companies figure
it out. And I'm kind of beating around the bush,
but this happened to me once where whenever the Apple
came out with new software for the iPhone, I would
literally press that refresh like a million times until it
came my way. And one time I did that, I

(20:50):
put install the software. Unbeknownst to me, it had a bug,
but it rendered my phone useless. Now, this was many,
many years ago, so I'm not saying that this happens
a lot anymore, but it could, and so my phone
had no cellular connection for I think twenty four hours
before they came out with a fix. And so, yeah,
that was frustrating. Let's go to now. I wait a

(21:11):
little bit. Now, I wait a little bit. Let's go
to Gary, Gary in Los Angeles around with Rich.

Speaker 6 (21:19):
Hi.

Speaker 7 (21:19):
Rich, I have a question. I've been having trouble lately
when I'm trying to watch YouTube live stream through my
Roku streaming stick, and I'm getting that spinning wheel and

(21:39):
I'm like the picture freezes up. And I think I
have a pretty fast Internet with a spectrum of spectrum
four hundred. But I think maybe I have an older
Wi Fi rounder it's over six years old. I was

(22:01):
wondering if maybe that's contributing to this slow speed.

Speaker 1 (22:08):
It could be, But let's number one, you have very
fast Internet. Four hundred is extremely fast. Don't forget cable
internet as like you have. Typically the download speed is
very fast. The upload speed is the slow part. So
your download speed is great.

Speaker 2 (22:23):
Now.

Speaker 1 (22:23):
By the way, YouTube does not need a lot of
bandwidth to to you know, stream videos. I mean part
of the magic of YouTube and Netflix. They're the pioneers
in streaming and so they have figured out how can
we stream this stuff in a clear way, even on
the worst possible signal. So I don't think that it
is your internet service. It could be a combination. How

(22:46):
old is this Roco.

Speaker 7 (22:49):
My rocoustick is four and a half years.

Speaker 1 (22:52):
Old, Okay, So I have a feeling it's either the
combination of the rocoustick and the.

Speaker 2 (23:00):
Wi Fi router, but a six year old WiFi router.

Speaker 1 (23:02):
I mean, yes, things have changed in that time, but
it really comes down to the placement of this router.
Does anything else buffer on your Roku stick?

Speaker 5 (23:13):
Uh?

Speaker 7 (23:13):
Basically it's only what's on YouTube, because like I'll open
up Roku and then I'll and I'll click on the
you you YouTube a and uh sometimes it will give
you'll see screen shots of all the YouTube channels. And

(23:33):
there's been times where the screen shots are very slow,
too low, and I'll just see like boxes.

Speaker 2 (23:43):
Well have you tried restarting the Roku?

Speaker 7 (23:49):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (23:49):
Okay, so you tried restarting that? What about that?

Speaker 4 (23:52):
Ye?

Speaker 5 (23:53):
Fine?

Speaker 7 (23:55):
On Roku you can check the connection and it says
signal strength excellent, and it says download speed anywhere. I've
seen anywhere from ninety one oh yeah to one oh two.
Is that fast enough?

Speaker 2 (24:12):
Oh yeah?

Speaker 1 (24:13):
That I mean we're talking. Netflix recommends twenty five down
for four K video, so you're talking ninety is four
times that. So yes, your your speed is completely fine.
So I think it has to do with the app
or the rokup. So have you updated this YouTube app
or the operating system on the Roku lately?

Speaker 7 (24:33):
Well, what I did was I uninstalled the YouTube appened, then.

Speaker 5 (24:42):
Reinstalled it and it still happened, and it still.

Speaker 7 (24:46):
Happens in the rokup. I went into the sheddings and
see if if there was an update, and it says
that it is up to date.

Speaker 2 (24:56):
Okay, well that's good. That's all good.

Speaker 1 (24:58):
So the final thing I'm seeing that you might be
able to do is what's called clearing the cash on your.

Speaker 2 (25:08):
Roku.

Speaker 1 (25:09):
So some users, I don't know if this is a
published thing for Roku or people just found a hack,
but this what I'm seeing online says you can press
the home button five times followed by the up button once.

Speaker 2 (25:22):
I don't know, this sounds silly.

Speaker 1 (25:24):
I'm reading this sounds like that abba thing we used
to do back in the day on Nintendo.

Speaker 2 (25:29):
But here's what it says.

Speaker 1 (25:30):
It says clear the cash by pressing the home button
five times, followed by the up button once, the rewind
button twice, and the fast forward button twice.

Speaker 2 (25:39):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (25:40):
That's sounding like a scam if you ask me. But
if I were you, I try it because you know
that may be your last resort. So I'm trying to
see it says. See, this is getting interesting. This is
saying it's weird because it's it's coming from some reputable
places like yeah, it's saying that it's you can do this.

Speaker 2 (26:04):
So I don't know.

Speaker 1 (26:04):
I mean, I would try that and see if that works. Yeah,
that's what I would try and see that's your last
kind of thing I would say if nothing else, is
what I would do again. Okay, so I try this
weird clear the cash thing. I don't know if that's
gonna work, but you can try it. So it's home
button five times, up, arrow once, rewind twice, fast forward
two times.

Speaker 2 (26:24):
Okay, you can try that.

Speaker 1 (26:26):
The other thing I would try to do is uninstall
the YouTube app, restart the Roku, and then reinstall the
YouTube app and see if that helps. And the other
thing you might be able to do if your Roku
is running low on storage, I might check the storage
on your Roku and if there's like an app or
two you don't need on there, I might get rid
of those apps and then restart it as well, because

(26:47):
it sounds like there's something going on here where it
just can't handle the YouTube situation. But keep me posted there, Gary,
that is a frustrating issue, But I don't think I
don't think your WiFi is the problem. You don't need
a new Wi Fi router after six years. I mean,
you can easily keep these things for a long time.
And again you told me your speed was ninety, so

(27:08):
I think your your speed to the roku is is
just fine. I'll put that link by the way, that
weird hack on the show notes Richontech dot TV. This
is episode one thirteen. You can find the show notes
there all right, eight eight eight rich one O one
Coming up, I'm gonna tell you why the smart watch

(27:30):
market has hit a snag for the first time ever.
We'll dive into some of those numbers and I'll tell
you the bright spot in all this right here on
rich on Tech. Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich
Demiro here hanging out with you, talking technology at Triple
eight rich one O one eight eight eight seven four
to two four one zero one. We have a special

(27:53):
guest on the line, our very own Kim Shaffer.

Speaker 2 (27:57):
Kim is it you?

Speaker 6 (28:01):
Oh my gosh, after two years, I finally get to
talk to you.

Speaker 1 (28:04):
You're here. Oh my gosh, where's the applause? Oh my gosh,
welcome to the show. So what's it like to answer
calls for the rich On Tech Radio show.

Speaker 6 (28:14):
It's awesome, But I like, I've only been communicating to
you through text and now this is like so interactive,
and we could have done this two years ago, but
we never thought of it until recently.

Speaker 2 (28:27):
Yeah. I just thought of this last week.

Speaker 1 (28:29):
I said, Hey, we should try to get you on
here because you may not know, but we fully embraced
the remote lifestyle. And so Kim is in a different location.
Bobo is somewhere in a foreign country. No, I'm just kidding.
He's right across the gate.

Speaker 2 (28:43):
Right in front of me.

Speaker 3 (28:47):
He is.

Speaker 1 (28:47):
Actually, we're on the border of California and Nevada.

Speaker 2 (28:52):
No, I'm just kidding.

Speaker 8 (28:53):
Exotic Sherman Oaks.

Speaker 1 (28:54):
Yes, exactly, totally exotic location. No, he's there. And do
you have anyone else on the team that's in a
different place?

Speaker 9 (29:01):
No?

Speaker 2 (29:01):
I think this is it. This is the whole show,
all right.

Speaker 1 (29:03):
So do we have a caller we can bring up Kim?

Speaker 6 (29:05):
Yes, So we have Larry in San Pedro, which down
up here up here where I am, we call San Pedro.

Speaker 10 (29:11):
But that would be totally wrong for.

Speaker 6 (29:13):
Me to do so in San Pedro he has a
call or he wants to know about Is it secure
to type in your credit card numbers into a smartphone?

Speaker 1 (29:25):
M I guess it depends on the situation. All right,
let's let's bring up Larry in uh San Pedro. Is
that how you say it?

Speaker 8 (29:33):
Yes?

Speaker 1 (29:33):
Sure, okay, welcome to the show. I should know how
to say that because I live near it. Kim does not, uh,
welcome to the show. So you have a problem with
your credit card number punching into a phone?

Speaker 2 (29:45):
What's the deal?

Speaker 5 (29:47):
Well, when I use my landline, uncomfortable typing in my
credit card to get to my Chase Bank account. But
I just I'm a new smartphone user. I just recently
bought a motor Rota Motive G and I'm wondering how

(30:09):
safe it is to check my account using this smartphone
and punching that credit card number in.

Speaker 1 (30:18):
Well, generally speaking, there is a potential for someone to
be listening in mostly the government, to your cell phone.
I don't think that that's going to happen. I don't
think that. I think you're safe. Let's put it that way.
I think you're safe. So it's an interesting thought, and
I think The bigger issue is whether you're typing your

(30:43):
number into a an unknown phone number. Right, if you
are calling Chase Bank and you know it's Chase Bank,
I think you're relatively safe. The other side of this
is this your debit card or your credit card.

Speaker 2 (30:56):
It's debit Oh okay, so debit card. Now. See here's
my thing.

Speaker 1 (31:01):
With debit cards, I'm usually a little bit more protective
because that is actual your money.

Speaker 7 (31:06):
Right.

Speaker 1 (31:07):
Credit card, it's the bank's money until they want to
collect it from you, and if there's an issue they
you know, you can just say, hey, look, i'm disputing this.
With a debit card, yes there are protections, but still
that money comes out of your account initially first. So
I am always much more cautious when it comes to
my debit card number than my credit card number. So

(31:28):
I do think that it's it's smart to be cautious,
especially with this card number. But I think you're going
to be okay typing in that number. You know, if
someone was listening on the line, I mean theoretically they
could probably figure out what touch tones that you're using.
But I think this is why banks are getting much
more into automated ways of identifying you and using voice
and all that stuff to identify who you are and

(31:49):
to authenticate the call. But I think in general you're okay.
This has been going on for a very long time,
and I don't hear of many stories of people being
hacked this way, so I think you're safe. The other
thing is, what about downloading the bank app to your
phone to check for the balance?

Speaker 2 (32:11):
Would you be open to that.

Speaker 5 (32:12):
I will all look into that because.

Speaker 2 (32:16):
That would be you know, you would number one.

Speaker 1 (32:18):
It would be simpler because you know, once you store
the login on your phone. You know, as long as
your phone is pass code protected and all that stuff,
you got to be secure. But you know, I've been
accessing my accounts online for a long time. It's been
it's been quite safe. In fact, I was doing this
a long time before it became popular to do that,
and nowadays it's very popular. People check their balances before

(32:40):
they make a purchase. They just check on them every
day just to see what's going on in there. So
but I think you're safe at the end of the day, Larry,
I think you're safe putting your credit card number into
the smartphone, you know, punching it in to authenticate the
account as long as you are dialing that number. If
it's someone that calls you and says, hey, we want
to tell your bank account balance, just type in your number.

(33:02):
I wouldn't do that, but you're not gonna do that anyway, right, correct?
How you like in the new phone? Is it okay
for you? Is this your first smartphone?

Speaker 9 (33:09):
You said, yes it is.

Speaker 5 (33:12):
Oh, wow, it's I guess to sum it all up,
it's a very smart phone. Well I'm impressed.

Speaker 1 (33:23):
Well, welcome to the year twenty twenty four or what
do we in twenty twenty five?

Speaker 5 (33:28):
Wow?

Speaker 2 (33:29):
I don't even know the year.

Speaker 1 (33:32):
Well what do I know? But no, Yeah, I'm glad
you got on board with the phone. I'm glad it's
working out for you, Larry, And thanks for the call today.
I do appreciate it. Eight eight eight rich one on
one eight eight eight seven four to two four one
zero one. Oh my gosh, I don't even know what
year it is. How can you trust a guy that
doesn't know what year it is?

Speaker 2 (33:51):
Especially on a tech show?

Speaker 1 (33:52):
On a tech show, here's the thing. I mean, some
days I don't even know what date is. Like I
go through the whole day and I like look at
my or my watch at the end of the day
and I'm like, oh, today's this day.

Speaker 2 (34:03):
I even Kim, this is what I go to every Saturday. Kim,
do you know what day it is?

Speaker 1 (34:08):
Every single day?

Speaker 2 (34:11):
I do not, thank you.

Speaker 1 (34:13):
See, oh well why do you Why do you know
what day it is every day?

Speaker 2 (34:17):
Because I work every day.

Speaker 6 (34:20):
Yeah, that's that's why I don't know what day it
is every day. Saturday is my benchmark.

Speaker 2 (34:25):
Saturday.

Speaker 1 (34:25):
You know when it's Saturday because you're doing the rich
On Tech radio show.

Speaker 2 (34:28):
I will tell you.

Speaker 1 (34:28):
I do know what day of the week it is
every single day of my life because that is very
important to what I do, both on TV and the radio.

Speaker 2 (34:36):
So I do know what day.

Speaker 1 (34:37):
I may not know the actual date, so I do
know that you know, Saint Patrick's Day is coming up
in a couple of days, so I will say Monday, Monday, Yes,
So there you go.

Speaker 2 (34:49):
So that's the seventeenth.

Speaker 1 (34:50):
So see, I'm wearing there's always a day. There's always
a day. This has become a party line. What is
happening here? Now we have the rich On Tech party
line show. Uh eighty eight rich one O one eight
eight eight seven four to two four one zero one.
All right, coming up, I'm gonna tell you about the
smart watch sales decline and the the bright point and

(35:12):
all this.

Speaker 2 (35:12):
Are we not going to break? We got time? What
ten seconds?

Speaker 4 (35:16):
Nine?

Speaker 2 (35:16):
Oh? Okay, well, oh, let.

Speaker 1 (35:18):
Me tell you this the website rich on Tech dot TV. Uh,
there is a way that you can watch all the
segments that I do on TV. They're all there on
the website. So if you're curious you want to see
some of the things I do on TV, go to
the website rich on Tech dot TV and sign up
for the newsletter. Great newsletter today. It's kind of like
this show in text form. It's a great read that'll

(35:41):
be sent your email box every weekend. Eighty to eight
rich one on one back after this, Welcome back to
rich on Tech. Rich Demiro here hanging out with you,
talking technology at triple A Rich one O one. That's
The website for the show show rich on Tech dot TV. Man,

(36:05):
you mentioned a phone number on the radio one time,
and it's like boom, the lines light up. So I've
got a whole bunch of things I want to talk
about but I also have a lot of callers, so
I'll do one quick story then I'll get to a call.

Speaker 2 (36:16):
How about that.

Speaker 1 (36:17):
I've been promising the smart watch market story for a while.
Global smart watch market declined by seven percent last year.
This is, according to Counterpoint Research, the first ever decline.
So that means people were buying smartphones for years, ten years,
and now last year they stopped. So Apple is still
the top seller, but their shipments were down nineteen percent

(36:39):
last year.

Speaker 2 (36:40):
Now I think I know why.

Speaker 1 (36:41):
Remember that big patent dispute on the Apple Watch about
the blood oxygen monitoring. I think that scared a lot
of people away last year because they saw the watches
not being full featured, so they just or they took
a wait and see approach. So that's probably what happened.
There other things that happened, apparently no Apple Watch Old
Time for three that didn't come out last year. People

(37:02):
saw the S ten series as having minimal upgrades, which
I disagree with because I've been wearing the S ten
and it's thinner, the screen is brighter, you can see
it for more angles. I thought it was actually a
great upgrade, and I guess less people are buying the
Apple Watch se which is sort of their entry level,
which tells me that a lot of people had that watch.
You know, this market's getting saturated. People that have a

(37:23):
smart watch or that want a smart watch have.

Speaker 2 (37:26):
A smart watch.

Speaker 1 (37:27):
But the one bright spot kids smart watches, Yes, that
is a segment that saw growth because of course parents
want to track their little ones and see where they are,
and they are handy. I know it's a tracker, but
to be honest, most of the time we use it
just to get in touch with our kids, and it
is very handy. So I think it's a good middle
ground between you know, having that smartphone and having nothing.

(37:48):
Let's go to let's go to act actor in Santa Barbara,
Am I saying that right?

Speaker 2 (37:53):
Actor? Yes, sir, all right, I'm glad.

Speaker 3 (37:55):
I got to thank you for taking my call. So
so long, long story short on my printers having to
be batty. This is an XP seventy one hundred Epstein
and all of a sudden on a random basis didn't
used to happen, but see happening increasingly more and more.
It will come on and it'll spit out gibberish like

(38:16):
eight pages of mostly blank page in one ward on top,
maybe blank page with short paragraph of gibberish on top.
And once that happens, you can't print anything. Gone through
all of you know, the philistine efforts called clean boats,
turn it off, pull the plug, counter ten, plug it

(38:37):
back and all that stuff. And what's happening anything?

Speaker 2 (38:41):
How old is this printer?

Speaker 3 (38:42):
Three years?

Speaker 1 (38:43):
Three years old? Okay, so it's relatively new. And was
there something By the way, we don't do printer questions
on this show. Oh sorry, yeah, but I'll answer this
one just as a freebie, because here's the here's what
I've realized actor in the in the fifteen years of
talking about technology on TV, there's never been a solution
to a printer problem ever, not once. There has never

(39:05):
been a printer that has been solved. Literally, people will
take their printer before they solve the problem, put it
in the trash can. That's the only way you can
solve a printer issue problem. But I will solve this one.
We will try. Okay, So it's printing out gibberish, which
is quite interesting. You said you've done all the main things,
which is turning off the printer, turning off your computer,

(39:26):
turning off the router restarting all of those things after
a few minutes. Okay, So the order you want to
turn them back on determines whether you may have some
other conflicts. So turn off your printer, turn off the computer,
turn off the router, turn back on the router, turn
back on the computer, then turn back on the printer
in that order. Okay, so you're going to reverse order.

(39:48):
See if that helps. If it doesn't, you know, you
can try a new cable, but that's probably not the problem.
The other thing that maybe the culprit here is something called,
and I'm just doing some research online here, the print spooler.
This is a section of Windows that sort of basically

(40:10):
is the intermediary between your computer and the printer. So
it's getting its instructions from this print spooler. And maybe
there's an issue with the print spooler, and so you
can go in. This gets a little complicated, but I
was able to do it very quickly on my computer.

Speaker 11 (40:27):
Here.

Speaker 1 (40:27):
If you just type services into the Windows taskbar, Okay, services,
you bring that up, and that'll bring up this window
with all kinds of things that are going on your
Windows computer. Scroll down to where you see print spooler, okay,
And when you do that, you can tap restart the service.

(40:48):
And so if you turn off that service, you won't
be able to use the printer at all. But if
you press restart, that should just restart the print spooler service,
says Windows is a tempting to start the following services.

Speaker 2 (41:01):
So it restarted, so that.

Speaker 1 (41:03):
May clear out any sort of issues that are going
on with the print spooler and see if that helps.
If not, I would just check for you know, I
would uninstall. I think you've said you did all this stuff,
but you know, uninstalled the printer driver, reinstall it, and
then if worse comes to worse and you really have
to do this, just take the printer, lift it up

(41:24):
and throw it out and then just buy a new one.
And that's the other thing. The printers are so cheap now.
It's like the printers on my Best Buy the printer's
fifty bucks, and it's like, oh wow, this printer's fifty dollars.
And when you go to buy ink, the ink's like
seventy five bucks. You're like, wait a second, what kind
of business are these printer companies running. I'm on that
like instant ink thing. Where I pay for the ink

(41:45):
every month, but it's like on a page basis, So
all of a sudden, when I print too many pages,
they're like, oh, we just charge you, like an extra
three dollars for that. I'm like, what, Like it's like
you get. I think I get one hundred pages a
month that I can print anyway. I hope that works
for you, ictor please keep me posted on the on
the website, send me email Rich on tech dot tv,
hit contact and let me know there. Let's see here.

(42:10):
We got an email from Tony in Pasadena. He said, hey, Rich,
I heard the call about the iTunes purchases that are gone.
I looked at Apple Music, I couldn't find anything about purchases.
I did check the iTunes Store app and found everything
I've purchased under purchases there. I do see family members
there as well. All right, so there's your purchases. You
can re download them from there. Let's see here. Gram

(42:34):
Grame writes in from San Diego, Rich, I need a
new iPhone. I have the iPhone seven plus, never had
any problems, but it's not supported anymore. A lot of
apps need updates, but they won't update. Just usually use
it for calls, text, email, browsing. I'm intrigued by the
sixteen E. I'm also thinking of moving a Mint Mobile.
Opinions comments, two questions. Thanks Oh Graham, Oh he wrote

(42:54):
it wrong at the top, Graham Graham, Yes one percent.
Don't even think about it. Get the sixteen E excellent
phone for what you need. Sounds like you just need
the basics. The sixteen E is six hundred dollars and
it'll give you everything you need, all of the latest features.
They're the basic versions of the features. But you get
a good camera, get a good processor, you get a

(43:16):
decent amount of storage, and I don't think there's anything
missing on here that you'll need Mint Mobile. As I
was running this morning, I was thinking how much I
like Mint Mobile. So yes, absolutely move to mint Mobile.
I mean fifteen bucks a month for their cheap plan,
thirty dollars a month unlimited and sometimes Mint Mobile. Because
now they're owned by T Mobile, we'll actually have deals

(43:40):
with smartphones. So some of the some of the phones
that they sell on there. Let's see if they have
this sixteen I don't know if they do. Let's say
sixteen E. Do they sell it? Yes, they do, so Okay,
that's interesting. So they sell price seven seventy nine with
a year of unlimited included. So let's just do the

(44:00):
math there. So thirty times twelve is three sixty, so
and the phone is six hundred plus sixty three sixty.
That's nine to sixty. Okay, so you are actually saving
almost two hundred dollars there by by buying the phone
through them and paying in advance for the year. But
I would personally just buy the phone out right at
the Apple store and just then go to Mint Mobile,

(44:23):
and I'd pay for the full year in advance. By
the way, if you can. You know, this is all
thinking that you can do that. But I would do
the twelve months up front because that's how you save
the most with mint Mobile, and right now, if you
do that, you're only paying twenty five dollars a month
instead of thirty if you pay for the full month.
My mom's on mint Mobile. She loves it. I have

(44:45):
Mint Mobile as my test line. I love it. They
I think they do a great job. I know they're
owned by the big wireless now and their whole thing
was like they were not the big guys, But I
think that they do a really good job on keeping
their plans simple and easy, and the service works. It's
on T Mobile, and I think that it's just the
way they run things. I like it keeps it simple

(45:06):
and understandable. And so for that reason, Graham, I would say,
go ahead and get the sixteen E, get the mint
Mobile plan. And you don't have to think about a
payment for a year when you do that. So that's
a great way to do it. Did you hear that
Pokemon Go is being sold. Pokemon Go is going to
Scopely three point five billion dollars. This company's buying Pokemon

(45:30):
Go for They're buying a bunch of other properties from
Nyantick as well. Scopely is owned by the Saudi Arabian
Sovereign Wealth Fund. They also invest in things like Lucid Motors,
Live Golf, and Uber. Basically, you know, Saudi Arabia is
trying to reduce its dependency on oil, and video games
are a big part of that. They're trying to, you know,

(45:51):
just put their investments in other places. And so, as
far as I can tell, it doesn't look like pokemon
Go is going to change.

Speaker 2 (45:58):
It just has new owners.

Speaker 1 (46:00):
So if you're worried about the change to scope leae,
I would check when you download the app or you
know you continue using the app once they take over.
Just be on the lookout for any sort of changes
in the terms and conditions, especially when it comes to
your personal information, your privacy information, because new companies will
try to slip in some new terms that may take advantage,

(46:20):
so just be careful there. But scope Lely is known
for their big game called Monopoly Go. And by the way,
Pokemon Go had like hundreds of millions of players when
it launched in twenty sixteen. Now it's down to about
twenty million, but still very popular. Eighty eight rich one
O one eight eight eight seven four to two four.

Speaker 2 (46:37):
One zero one.

Speaker 1 (46:39):
Welcome back to rich on Tech rich Tomuro here hanging
out with you talking technology at triple eight rich one
oh one eight eight eight seven four to two four
to one zero one. The website for the show richon
Tech dot TV. Don't be shy, it's a free visit.
You can go there and find everything you need, whether

(47:02):
it is show notes, the email address to email me,
just hit contact.

Speaker 2 (47:07):
What else? I keep a list?

Speaker 1 (47:09):
Where's my list of stuff? I have a list of
all the things that you can do and of course
I can't find it. You know, I do think I'm
pretty organized, bobo, but sometimes you know that this show,
this show takes a lot of.

Speaker 2 (47:23):
Yeah, oh, let's seasy here. No, okay, I don't know
where it is.

Speaker 1 (47:27):
Eighty eight rich one on one eight eight eight seven
four two four one zero one. Let's see here. I
wanted to mention that, let's see. Well, I don't know
what I wanted to mention. I I'm just told, oh,
we have a guest coming up. That's right, we have
a guest. Well, you think it's my first day doing
the show here? Huh yeah, let's just go to Sue

(47:50):
in Westminster.

Speaker 2 (47:52):
Sue, you're on with Rich.

Speaker 4 (47:54):
I'm Rich.

Speaker 12 (47:54):
Thank you for taking my call. So it's time to
replace my PC, probably maybe ten years old at this point,
the traditional PC tower and monitor, and I'd like to
try and eliminate some desk clutter. And I'm contemplating in
all in one. Yeah, can you give me the pros
and cons of an all in one and maybe get

(48:16):
some model recommendations. I've always been a HP.

Speaker 1 (48:21):
Yeah, HP is great. So here's the deal. All in
one PC is basically like you said, it's less clutter.
It's easy. It's all in one, so there's you know,
it's space saving. The big downside to them is that
they are not traditionally upgradeable in a big way. So
if you need to, you know, upgrade something later on,

(48:43):
you're probably not gonna be able to do that. So
that's the big downside the tower PCs. If you're looking
at like a you know, big old tower PC, obviously
those are built with power in mind, expandability in mind,
and you can connect all the peripherals that you want
to connect, so you can choose the monitor, you can
choose the keyboard, you can choose the mouse. I mean,

(49:04):
you could do that with a standard all in one,
but it's gonna it's all gonna come in the box.
You're not gonna want to buy new ones. So those
are the two main reasons for each. I think it
kind of depends what you're doing too. Are you a
big gamer? You're doing a lot of gaming on this PC?

Speaker 12 (49:19):
No, you know, I'm proaching sixty five, just banking, shopping,
social media research, Okay, I've never had to upgrade anything.

Speaker 1 (49:30):
Yeah, I think you'll be fine with the all in
one because I think it's gonna be simpler. You're trying
to get the You mentioned the word clutter, and so
that is the biggest benefit is less cables all over
the place. And so are you thinking MAC or PC?
You said HP, huh PC?

Speaker 2 (49:47):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (49:48):
So I typically recommend if you go to Costco. If
you do you have a Costco membership or no? Oh yeah, okay,
oh oh. I like the way you said that you're
a Costco fan. Huh okay, me too. So they typically
in their electronics section have one to two all in ones,
and I look at them every time I go there
to just confirm this. But they are always an excellent

(50:09):
deal and you choose one of those and you're basically
getting maybe one hundred dollars more versus the price tag
of what you get at another store that's not a
membership based store. So I would say go to Costco
if they have one, grab it. Just make sure the
specs that I like to look for these days, I

(50:29):
would say typically at least sixteen gigs of RAM. Of course,
a one terabyte hard drive that's going to be pretty
simple to find in an all in one, and I
would look for either an Intel A five is probably fine,
A seven is a little bit faster. They all go
by like this, five and seven. So whether it's a
MD or Intel, the seven is going to be faster.

(50:52):
Nine is going to be much faster. But usually I
don't really see those in the all ones. But just
stay away from the three. That's gonna be too slow.
And I don't even think Costco has that in general,
but that's what I would recommend.

Speaker 2 (51:03):
So, yeah, that's a good upgrade. Ten years. Ten years
is a good amount of time to get out of
a computer.

Speaker 12 (51:09):
I like, yeah, but it's going out a snail's pace
right now, so it's time.

Speaker 2 (51:15):
Yeah, I hear it.

Speaker 1 (51:16):
Well, thanks for the call, Sue, appreciate it and enjoy
the new computer. We're actually gonna have Kimber streams on
from the Wirecutter, so Sue, you may want to listen
because you may be able to give your computer a
whole new lease on life once you hear what Kimber
has to say about, you know, spring cleaning your PC.

Speaker 2 (51:34):
So you can do that, all right.

Speaker 1 (51:36):
So AT and T, by the way, is trying to
get people to buy landlines again, but they're not the
same landline that you're used to. This is a new
service called AT and T Phone Advanced. It's not available
in every market, but they're in sixty markets across sixteen states.

Speaker 2 (51:52):
They keep expanding this.

Speaker 1 (51:53):
They just expanded it southern California, so you're gonna have
to check to see where you're listening if they have
this in your area, even want it, but if you
you know AT and T has been on a push
to move away from copper landlines. This thing is basically
a box that uses both cellular or broadband. So you
basically can use a cellular connection that's built in, or

(52:14):
you can plug your Internet into it and then you
can change you know, you can pour it over your
existing phone number, keep your current phone. So if you
have a nice landline, you want some sort of rotary
dial phone that you've kept for many years that you
still like. I don't know why you would, but maybe
you know you're nostalgic, you can plug it into this
thing and it acts like a regular phone. Then you
can put a fax machine into it, alarms, medical monitoring systems.

(52:38):
It has a twenty four hour backup battery to make
sure you stay connected even during a power outage. So anyway,
it's called AT and T Phone Advance. The competitors here
are things like Uma Vonage, but Magic Jack, but.

Speaker 2 (52:53):
At and T you know, big name, very easy.

Speaker 1 (52:56):
Pay a buck for this thing, and then it's forty
five dollars a month for the service. All right, coming up,
we're gonna talk about spring cleaning your PC. Welcome back
to rich on Tech. Rich DeMuro here hanging out with you,
talking technology at Triple eight Rich one oh one. That's
We're gonna get to our guests. Our guest guest Kimber

(53:18):
streams in just a moment. But first I got an
email from Brian in San Juan Capistrano and he said, uh, hey,
I heard the call about YouTube buffering. My YouTube buffering
started when I lost you block. This is an ad
blocker buffers for about ten seconds, tries to show me
an ad The two could be related. That's a great call, Brian.
I did not ask our caller about if he had

(53:41):
an AD blocker on his network that could be interfering
with his YouTube. So I know, for me, I've got
Eero and they have like a network wide ad blocking thing,
and so I've never really seen a lot of issues
with that. Interrupting things, not even YouTube, but that could
be the problem. So yeah, good call. And he also

(54:02):
asked what's the best replacement? But we're gonna have a
guest on in the third hour to talk about the
best ad blocker replacements. But first we've got Kimber Streams
on the line, tech reviewer at the Wirecutter. It's been
reviewing computers and all kinds of stuff for over a
decade now, and Kimber is going to tell us how
to spring clean our PC. Welcome to the show, Kimber,

(54:25):
thank you, I should say welcome back to the show
because you were an early guest.

Speaker 10 (54:31):
I owe an early guest for back to school laptops.

Speaker 1 (54:33):
Yeah, oh my gosh. So let's talk about spring cleaning PCs. Well,
tell me first off about the PC market. What's going
on with that, what's the latest?

Speaker 13 (54:43):
So right now, it's kind of a weird time in
the PC market. There's a lot of choice available, but
also a lot of anxiety for people looking to buy
a laptop with increasing prices because of tariffs. So I've
got a lot of questions about like do I need
to upgrade my laptop? Can I keep using what I
already have? When is a good time to buy something.

Speaker 1 (55:03):
Have the prices gone up because I know Apple, just
I know you know this is Apple. They do their
own thing, but they lowered the price by one hundred bucks.
Have we seen an increase in prices.

Speaker 13 (55:13):
In some laptops, Yes, but not all laptops. So there
is still I think a window to get something pretty
great before those prices start climbing.

Speaker 1 (55:21):
And I know we're seeing changes with like the AI button,
like that little copile of button, and then of course
the snap Dragon processors. But in general, if you have
a computer you like, is this the time to.

Speaker 2 (55:33):
Spring clean it?

Speaker 10 (55:35):
Absolutely?

Speaker 2 (55:37):
And what's the first step? What do you what do you?
How do you assas well?

Speaker 1 (55:39):
Hold on, I guess my question is how do you
assess if a spring Do you try this first with
your computer and then maybe get a new one if
it doesn't like it still is like not working very well?

Speaker 13 (55:50):
Yes, So if your laptop feels slow, you might actually
be able to take a few steps to just clean
up some programs, clean up your storage a little bit,
and dust it out, and that'll help it feel faster
and you might be able to keep using the same
laptop for another year or two or even three if
you take care of it.

Speaker 2 (56:07):
Well, So what's the first step. What do you do first?

Speaker 13 (56:11):
So, first you want to physically clean it out, so
dust builds up inside of your laptop, inside of your desktop,
and every six months to a year, depending on how
dusty your living space might be, you'll actually want to
open it up and clean it out.

Speaker 1 (56:25):
Oh wow, that's I used to love doing that with
my big old computer, you know, but with a laptop.
I still love cleaning my computer. In fact, I wipe
down my laptop today with like a little you know,
alcohol wipe. I love doing that. It's just like my
favorite thing to do. It's just like so satisfying it is.
And the screen, I will say, the screen is tricky
because you know, A, you don't want to ruin it,

(56:45):
and B it's like could leave a little streak, so
just be careful. My advice with that is like, if
you're using any sort of wet cloth, ring it out
as much as possible, because you do not want water
like on this computer.

Speaker 13 (56:57):
Right, Yes, absolutely so I will use a microfiber cloth
actually and dip it in just a tiny bit of
down soap and hot water and.

Speaker 10 (57:05):
Wring it out really really good, and if it's hot
enough and dry.

Speaker 13 (57:09):
Enough whenever you do it, then all of that extra
moisture is just going to evaporate off your screen, so
you don't damage the screen or drik water into the
bits of your lap up that you absolutely do not
want water in.

Speaker 1 (57:19):
Yeah, and I did do that once I cleaned. I'll
never forget this. I was cleaning my laptop with like
one of those Lightsol wipes and I just literally took
it out of the Lightsol box, put it on there.
All the lightsol got into my keyboard, and like an
hour later stop working.

Speaker 2 (57:33):
I'm not kidding though.

Speaker 1 (57:34):
I dried out that computer for like two weeks and
it worked again and I got a lot of use.

Speaker 2 (57:40):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (57:41):
Okay, so what's the best way to free up storage
on your computer?

Speaker 8 (57:46):
Yes?

Speaker 13 (57:46):
So on Windows and Mac you can open up the
storage menu. It's called the same thing on both operating systems,
and then I'll actually give you a readout of what's
taking up the most space on your computer. A couple spaces.
The places that are like easy to reclaim storage. In Windows,
there's that temporary files folder. There's a button in the
storage venue that you can just blow that up and
get rid of it. You're not getting rid of anything important.

(58:08):
Your computer will download anything else that it needs. Back
to that, I also recommend going through your downloads folder.
There's probably years of PDFs and memes and app installers
and all of that that you have not paid attention to.
There might be a couple of things that you need
in there, but probably most of it you can get
rid of.

Speaker 2 (58:26):
I do that every Friday.

Speaker 1 (58:27):
I love that little sound of just cleaning out the
track or the downloads folder.

Speaker 2 (58:32):
What about apps?

Speaker 1 (58:33):
So I always, you know, like I test a lot
of apps, as I'm sure you do, so I'm always
installing like apps and then just forgetting about them.

Speaker 2 (58:41):
Is it a good idea to kind of get rid
of some of those things?

Speaker 13 (58:45):
Yes, So Windows has an installed apps venue, and then
back to that same storage menu.

Speaker 10 (58:50):
In Mac, there's.

Speaker 13 (58:51):
Going to be like a whole list of all of
the apps that are on your computer. You want to
remove anything that you're not using anymore. Some computers also
come with a lot of floatwear that's pre installed that
is not stuff that you need. If you're not sure
what an app is or does in that list, you
can actually look it up on the should I remove it?
Website and it'll tell you what that app is and
does and whether or not you want to get rid

(59:12):
of it.

Speaker 1 (59:13):
And also I noticed that you can sort that menu
by large to small, So if you just want to see,
like what's taking up the most space, you can do
it that way. But I like the idea of can
you ruin your computer if you unstall something that set's like,
you know, supposed to be there.

Speaker 10 (59:27):
Not from that menu?

Speaker 2 (59:28):
No, okay, good, good to know there.

Speaker 1 (59:31):
Okay, so what about you know these these programs love
to launch when you start your computer, right because they're
sticky and they get you know, they get in your face.
So do you can you stop that from happening?

Speaker 13 (59:43):
Yes, So whenever your computer restarts, it launches kind of
a series of apps that it's been told or important.
And if it's trying to launch too many, your startup
is going to feel sluggish and it might take a
few minutes instead of just a few seconds. There is
a startup menu in both Windows and Mac and you
can keep the important things that you need to be
running in the background all the time, like maybe your

(01:00:04):
password manager or a cloud backup program. But I go
through that list that I turn off apps like Slack
or Discord or Steam that I'm just going to launch
whenever I.

Speaker 10 (01:00:13):
Need to use them.

Speaker 13 (01:00:14):
And I also don't use certain things that are in
that list, like the Microsoft Edge browser or like Microsoft's
phone length features, so I go ahead and turn those off,
and then that makes my computer startup faster because it's
launching less things at the same time.

Speaker 1 (01:00:27):
And that's again if you go into your settings and
just type in startup. I just saw this. Wow, I
didn't realize that Edge starts up. I'm turning it off
right now, thank you. I just got to win. We're
talking to kimber Streams, who's been covering laptops and tech
at Wirecutter for over a decade about spring cleaning your PC.
What about the updates and the browser extensions. I feel like,

(01:00:50):
you know, should you get rid of those browser extensions?
Can that slow things down if you don't need them anymore?

Speaker 10 (01:00:55):
Yeah, So it's the same as a startup.

Speaker 13 (01:00:57):
If your computer is trying to run too many apps
or too many things in the background, it'll feel slower.
So you can go through your extensions, turn off ones
that don't need to run all the time. I have
a specific pdf mage one that I only use to
save PDFs. I don't need that running all the time.
I can just run that when I want to. So
you can disable those to make browsing feel faster.

Speaker 1 (01:01:17):
And so what about anything else I'm not asking that
you think is really important to speeding up and clean
up the PC?

Speaker 10 (01:01:26):
Anything else?

Speaker 2 (01:01:28):
What about backing up?

Speaker 1 (01:01:29):
I mean, don't you think that's like such a thing
that I guess so many people like calling and emailing
about they lose things all the time.

Speaker 2 (01:01:35):
Like, what's the best way to back up? You think?

Speaker 13 (01:01:39):
So, there's a couple of different ways, but the easiest
one is that both Windows and Mac have free backup options.
It's file History for Windows and time Machine on Mac.
Both of those things only take about ten minutes or
like four steps to set up, and then they're going
to happen automatically going forward, so you don't have to
keep paying.

Speaker 10 (01:01:57):
Attention to your backup. It will just happen.

Speaker 13 (01:02:00):
We do have step by step guides for setting that
up on wire cover.

Speaker 1 (01:02:04):
Oh that's kind of cool. So file history interesting. So
you plug in a drive and it will kind of yeah,
build a history of your library's desktop contacts and favorites.
That's kind of cool and in time Machine I'm familiar
with on the Mac side. Okay, so you do all
this stuff, how do you know if it's time to
get a new computer or stick with what you got.

Speaker 10 (01:02:26):
Yes, So if you've gone through all of these steps
and you still boot up your computer and it feels slow,
if you're trying to do basic tasks like browsing the web,
doing email and it still just feels really slow and frustrating,
then it's actually probably time to bite the bullet and
upgrade your computer.

Speaker 2 (01:02:41):
All right.

Speaker 1 (01:02:41):
So the article is how to make your old computer
feel new Again. The author kimber Streams. You can find it.
I'll link it up on the website. This has everything
that we just talked about and more, by the way,
So if you want to see all these step by
step instructions and it feels good to do this, like
when you clean your computer and kind of like get
rid of all the junk, I it feels really good now, Kimber.

(01:03:04):
I every year, once a year usually reinstall the you know,
the software from scratch, like the operating system. That seems
a little elaborate for most people probably, but I really
like doing that because I start fresh. Let's talk about
a laptop recommendation. You have a computer recommendation if someone
just wants like a nice, good computer for maybe five
six seven hundred bucks.

Speaker 8 (01:03:26):
Yes.

Speaker 13 (01:03:26):
So, out of the fifty thitted light ultrabooks that I've
tested last year and this year so far, those are
roughly the Windows equivalent to the MacBook Air. The best
one that I found is the aces Vivo Book S fourteen,
and the specific model number on that is Q four
two three.

Speaker 10 (01:03:42):
Essay, it's such a catchy name.

Speaker 1 (01:03:44):
Q four three sa Aceus Vivo Book fourteen.

Speaker 2 (01:03:49):
What do you like about this?

Speaker 10 (01:03:51):
So it is a great laptop.

Speaker 13 (01:03:54):
It's thin and light, It lasted eighteen hours in Wirecutters
web browsing battery life test. It is just two point
eight seven pounds, and it has great performance now and
for years to come. It's got a recent processor in it.
It has sixteen gigs of memory, five hundred and twelve
gigs of storage, and a very spacious fourteen inch Ola display.
So the color is gonna look really.

Speaker 10 (01:04:15):
Nice on it.

Speaker 1 (01:04:16):
And what a sweet deal right now? I know, as
who's computers are typically discounted at best Buy a lot
four hundred and ninety nine bucks for this thing right
now usually nine p fifty. That's a great deal. All right, Kimber, awesome, excellent,
great job. Thank you so much for coming on the
show today. I'll link up a Kimber Streams article on
Richontech dot tv. You are listening to rich on Tech.

(01:04:40):
Welcome back to rich on Tech. Rich Demiro here hanging
out with you, talking technology at triple eight Rich one
oh one. That's eight eight eight seven four to two
four one zero one. Let's go to U D D
in West Covina. Did you're on with Rich.

Speaker 14 (01:05:00):
Mine good to talk to you. I love all your
advice everybody.

Speaker 2 (01:05:04):
Thank you DD. What can I help you with?

Speaker 3 (01:05:08):
I need a.

Speaker 14 (01:05:09):
New television set. I have bad macular degeneration and it's
going and I've been trying to find a television that
is bright, that has good contrast. I've done nothing but
get myself totally confused, trying to look on Google, going
through best bite. I mean, everybody, who's the best?

Speaker 13 (01:05:26):
You know, da, da da?

Speaker 8 (01:05:27):
What would be the.

Speaker 14 (01:05:28):
Best kind of television to get? I've seen something called
the Supersonic. Another one is Sony's bravera nine led. I've
seen a Samsung q n D nine D or what
as I say. I've gotten myself so confused, and everybody says, oh,
this is the best, this is the best. I thought,
why don't I just call the pro and find out

(01:05:50):
what would you recommend for something that is bright and
has good contrast? Yeah, I think it's only twenty four
or twenty eight inches fit my cat.

Speaker 1 (01:06:00):
Oh okay, well that's twenty four or twenty eight.

Speaker 2 (01:06:03):
That's okay.

Speaker 1 (01:06:03):
It's gonna be a little tricky to find a TV
in that size, but you should be able to. But
I think I think in general, so out of all
the companies that I cover, the one that I hear
talk about accessibility features the most is Samsung, out of
all the TV manufacturers. So I would go with Samsung
because they typically make a big splash at CES talking

(01:06:26):
about the accessibility features built into their TVs, and specifically
when you're talking contrast, that is one of the big
pushes that they typically talk about. They have some features
built into their TV that do boost the contrast, that
do make the screen easier to see if you do

(01:06:46):
have any sort of vision issues. Now, they just this
year they're using much more AI for all that kind
of stuff. So your TV, if you're looking at like
a twenty twenty five model, you know, that may have
the the AI stuff, but before, even before the AI,
they've had a lot of features built in to help

(01:07:08):
with you know, with accessibility and vision features.

Speaker 14 (01:07:12):
So I think, yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:07:14):
I would.

Speaker 1 (01:07:15):
I would go with the Samsung because I think you're
gonna find and also they you know, they update their
software a lot.

Speaker 2 (01:07:20):
I mean, it's just every time I go to a.

Speaker 1 (01:07:22):
Samsung event, they make a big deal out of the
accessibility features. So I think that they are actively working
on that and focusing on it, and so that's.

Speaker 2 (01:07:29):
Why I'd go with them.

Speaker 14 (01:07:30):
Oh that's awesome. Well I will look at Samsung then
and see. I guess Best Buys would probably be the
best place to look.

Speaker 1 (01:07:36):
For that, do you think yeah, I'd say so, I'd
go to best Buy, and I would I would try
to find a demo unit where you can actually activate
the accessibility feature.

Speaker 2 (01:07:45):
I know it may be tough. Where do you live
West Covina.

Speaker 1 (01:07:48):
If there's a local place, like, you know, like a
local retailer, you may be able to actually play with
the TV a little bit more, and like ask a
salesperson to like, let you look at the settings and
see That's what I would recommend, because that way you
can actually see, you know, go into the accessibility menu,
toggle the contrast setting and see if that helps. And
if it does, that's the one to get. At best Buy,

(01:08:09):
they're all on kind of that loop, you know, where
I don't know if you'll be able to play with
the TV set as you would at a local place.

Speaker 14 (01:08:16):
Oh that's great advice, Thank you very much. And would
they have to be what would they have to install it?
Or could my sons and grandsons do it?

Speaker 1 (01:08:25):
Oh no, I think your sons and grandsons can do it,
especially you're talking. You said twenty five to twenty eight inch.
I mean that's that's going to be. You can pick
that up with you know, it's very these TVs have
gotten so light. When was the last time you replaced yours?

Speaker 14 (01:08:40):
Well, I had gotten one about five years ago and
in it got sadly got broken.

Speaker 2 (01:08:44):
Oh no, what happened to it?

Speaker 14 (01:08:47):
Well, we were trying to install some other things with
the recorder type thing and when we pulled or when
they pulled on the cords, TV plopped over and hit
something in the screen. Went great, but.

Speaker 1 (01:09:04):
Oh no, okay, Oh, I just found the mode that
that Samsung is always showing off.

Speaker 2 (01:09:09):
It's called Relumino mode.

Speaker 1 (01:09:11):
R E l U M I n O Relumino Mode,
and it says if you struggle to see the screen
when enjoying movies or other content, you can use Relumino
Mode on twenty twenty four Samsung TVs.

Speaker 2 (01:09:24):
I mean, you know that's I think that's when this
came out.

Speaker 1 (01:09:27):
It increases the contrast and brightness of the screen and
emphasizes the outlines of images to help you see every
bit of the action.

Speaker 2 (01:09:35):
Does that sound like it would help?

Speaker 14 (01:09:36):
Oh that sounds absolutely perfect, because come night time, everything well,
I've got a very old Toyoga Toshiba and everything turns
black and purple.

Speaker 2 (01:09:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:09:46):
Well that's yeah, that's probably the contrast ratio on your TV.
I mean, older models are just not as good. But
this is I think what you need. So did check
it out, Samsung. Make sure you look for that relumin
reluine me mode on that TV and I will look
it up.

Speaker 14 (01:10:02):
Oh you're an angel. Thank you so very very much.
I truly appreciate all your help and I love your programs.
I'm not a tech person, but I'm fascinated listening to
everything that's going on in the world.

Speaker 8 (01:10:12):
That's great.

Speaker 1 (01:10:13):
Thanks Ded, Just to let everyone know, we do not
pay DD to say this. Thank you, d D. You
put a smile on my face. Really appreciate it. Have
a great day there in West Covina. Eight eight eight
rich one on one eight eight eight seven four to
two four one zero one. Bobo always says, I pay
these people to say this stuff. I don't pay, Yes,
you do.

Speaker 2 (01:10:31):
I do not. If you check book in there last
time I was here, I'd be a broke man.

Speaker 1 (01:10:38):
The website rich on Tech dot TV if you want
to go there, sign up for the newsletter, look for
the show notes. This is episode one thirteen, So d D,
if you want to see what I mentioned, I'll link it.

Speaker 2 (01:10:48):
Up on the website. Very easy to search.

Speaker 1 (01:10:50):
Just go to the website, hit that magnifying glass and
type in one thirteen and look at that brings you
right to the episode more rich on Tech coming your
way right after this. Welcome back to rich on Tech.
Rich Demiro here talking technology with you at eight eight

(01:11:12):
eight rich one one eight eight eight seven four to
two four one zero one. Welcome to another hour of
the show. We've got Jared Newman coming up later.

Speaker 2 (01:11:22):
What a treat.

Speaker 1 (01:11:23):
Jared writes a newsletter called Advisorator. One of my favorites.
The people who write newsletters read Jared's newsletter.

Speaker 2 (01:11:32):
He's great.

Speaker 1 (01:11:34):
You can sign up for his newsletter for free, mind too. Yeah,
I'm just making sure that his is free. I think
it is. There's at least a free level. Well, we'll
ask him when he comes on, but he's gonna talk
about the best ad blockers, how to get rid of
those annoying sign in with Google pop ups, and his
quest for the perfect web browser. I will tell you,

(01:11:56):
I will admit after all this time, and I'm not kidding,
trying every single note taking app. So I always say
you can do this search on Google called whatever you're
searching for versus. So for me, Evernoe was my favorite
note taking app for years, and then I had to

(01:12:16):
find something different. So if you type in Evernote versus,
it'll give you Notion, one Note, Obsidian, Google Keep Good Notes,
Apple Notes, Notability. I tried every single one of those,
plus more Joplin. I think there's bear, I mean there's
so many. I tried every single one and I'm telling
you this week I went back to Evernoe. After all that,

(01:12:39):
I've come full circle because I have decided that I'm
an adult and if I want to pay one hundred
bucks a year forever note, so be it. It does
exactly what I needed to do. And I was very
sad about getting involved with Evernoe because the more you
put in here, the more you have to pay forever.

(01:13:00):
Every other app that I was using, I'd be like, Oh,
it doesn't do that.

Speaker 2 (01:13:03):
Every note does that. Oh it doesn't do that. Every
note does that? Oh it doesn't do that. Ever Note
does that? Why am I trying to use a program
that doesn't do what I want to do?

Speaker 8 (01:13:11):
Ever?

Speaker 2 (01:13:11):
Note does it all.

Speaker 1 (01:13:12):
I'm sitting here, like every little thing I do on there,
I smile because it's so exciting that it does exactly
what I want to do.

Speaker 2 (01:13:19):
I mean, I'm not kidding. I could go through.

Speaker 1 (01:13:23):
Maybe my next show, I'll do the beginning of the
show about all the pros and cons of these things
because I've tried them all. Like one Note by Microsoft.

Speaker 2 (01:13:31):
Love it.

Speaker 1 (01:13:31):
It's great, It's almost perfect. But the problem with one
Note is you go to try to print something and
on a mac at least it's all over the place.
It doesn't print it properly. And by the way, it's
also like this infinite like canvas, so you can't just
like have stuff like flow in a line.

Speaker 2 (01:13:47):
It's really weird.

Speaker 1 (01:13:49):
Obsidian, which I was using, was great, but it just
became I tried to search for something and I couldn't
find it, and I'm like, why am I going crazy
trying to say this stuff up that doesn't really do
what I need to do.

Speaker 2 (01:14:03):
Let's just go back to everyno. So that's what I did. Sonywa.

Speaker 1 (01:14:05):
I'm back on EVERYNOE and I do like it. It
is expensive, but you know what, I use it to
produce this show, and that to me is worth it.
Speaking of free, if you're trying to share a large
file simply and easily, there's a website I discovered this
week called file Pizza File dot Pizza super easy.

Speaker 2 (01:14:26):
You literally open.

Speaker 1 (01:14:27):
Up the website on your device, open up the website
on a friend's device, drag a file in, and boom,
you can share it. So the way it works is
it's peer to peer file transfers in the browser, so
these transfers never pass through file pizzas servers, so it's
kind of a big deal for privacy, and basically you

(01:14:48):
do have to keep your browser window open until the
transfer is complete. It's all open source, which means a
lot of people kind of check in on this stuff
make sure that it's good. But basically, you drop a
file in, so just drop any old file there. Let
me find a file. Okay, I'm dropping one in. You
can set a secret password if you want, and if
you don't want it, you know, anyone with a link

(01:15:09):
will be able to do it. And then it generates
a QR code, a long URL and a short URL.
So if Bobo came in here right now and just
or if I sent him this link from his phone,
he could download this file instantly right from my computer.
Like it'll kind of like sets up a connection between
the two. Very easy, very simple. My kid was trying

(01:15:29):
to share something from his Windows laptop to his iPad
and he's like, Dad, I can't air drop this. I said,
go to file pizza. He's like, Dad, I love file pizza.
It's so easy. It's just one of those things where
like if you're with a friend, you're in their house
and you're like, what's the easiest way to transfer this
file from my thing to your thing file pizza cross platform, simple,

(01:15:50):
easy in the browser. I love it. I love finding
stuff like that. I'll put it on the website. Rich
on tech dot TV. If you got my newsletter this morning,
you already knew about that because I mentioned it in
the newsletter. Rich on tech dot TV. Uh, subscribe.

Speaker 2 (01:16:03):
It is free.

Speaker 1 (01:16:04):
There's over forty thousand of you that get it. Actually more,
it's like forty three thousand in counting. Now let's go
to Bob in Lake Forest, California.

Speaker 2 (01:16:14):
Bob, you're on with Rich.

Speaker 11 (01:16:15):
Hey, Rich love your show man.

Speaker 2 (01:16:17):
Thanks.

Speaker 11 (01:16:19):
Hey, I've got a situation here. I know you're you
really preached for the mint Mobile. Your mom has it.
I got mine.

Speaker 2 (01:16:27):
Hey, don't bring my mom into this. Bob. You just
said your call, you call you, Okay.

Speaker 11 (01:16:35):
So yeah, every time I leave my house and go
out about three times a day, I'll pull something up
and it says you have no selling you the service
and I have to reboot hauled customer service. And of
course they just go, oh, we'll send your send back.

Speaker 5 (01:16:52):
The what do you call it?

Speaker 8 (01:16:53):
Goes in there, the sim card sim card.

Speaker 11 (01:16:57):
Yeah, And I said, well then I'll have a phone
and I need it to work. He says, oh, well,
go get another phone and then send the SIM crisis,
it's not going to work on any suggestions. And what's
going on?

Speaker 2 (01:17:06):
Okay? So what kind of phone do you have?

Speaker 11 (01:17:09):
I have a Galaxy A fourteen Camason.

Speaker 1 (01:17:12):
Okay, So you have an A fourteen so well, there
could be several things going on. So number one, this
phone may not have the reception that a more powerful
phone has, so that could be what's happening? Do you
have no service on your phone?

Speaker 2 (01:17:27):
Whatsoever? Or week? Service?

Speaker 8 (01:17:30):
No?

Speaker 11 (01:17:30):
Service is fine? Exact. I just went from T Mobile
to mint Mobile and I had T Mobile for a year,
never had one problem.

Speaker 5 (01:17:36):
With okay at all?

Speaker 1 (01:17:36):
All right, so this is the same This is the
same network, so you shouldn't have a problem if you
had service. Have you configured the apns? Have you heard
that term from the no?

Speaker 2 (01:17:47):
Okay? So that's what I think it is.

Speaker 1 (01:17:49):
So basically Mint Mobile is a little bit different from
some of the other providers where typically when you pop
that SIM card in, it should send your phone a
text message with these special settings that will configure how
it looks for the cell towers and sometimes that does
not happen, and especially were you using this phone with

(01:18:09):
Team Mobile before? Oh yeah, okay, So there's two things
I'd like you to do. Number one, you can text
set up to sixty seven hundred and they will send
the settings to your phone. Okay, so that's number one. Now,
if that does not work, what I want you to
do is do what's called a reset network settings.

Speaker 2 (01:18:29):
Have you done that?

Speaker 13 (01:18:31):
No?

Speaker 1 (01:18:31):
Okay, I'm surprised these customer service folks have not told
you this. But basically, if you go into your Samsung okay,
if you go into settings, and I'll link this up
on the website, you go.

Speaker 2 (01:18:42):
To let's see where is it reset? Let's see about phone?
Hold on, I.

Speaker 1 (01:18:48):
Gotta find it if I type in, if you just
search reset okay, and if you go to reset and
you'll see it says reset mobile network settings.

Speaker 2 (01:18:59):
And so if you have that, you.

Speaker 1 (01:19:01):
Reset, it's basically gonna reset your mobile network settings, which
means is gonna clear out the old T mobile settings,
It's gonna clear out the Mint Mobile settings, and then
when it looks at that sim card, it's gonna go, okay,
we've got Mint Mobile, send me the new settings for
this and it should automatically find the new settings. So
if it doesn't work, forget this phone number, forget you

(01:19:21):
ever talked to me, because then you won't have any signal.
But I think I think it's gonna work, and I
think that's gonna one of those issues is going to
fix your problems. I would start with the with the
setup to sixty seven hundred, start with that, and if
that doesn't work, I would try the network settings reset
and see if that helps. If those two things do

(01:19:42):
not work, you could consider switching to like an eSIM,
and that could also.

Speaker 2 (01:19:50):
I don't think that would help.

Speaker 1 (01:19:52):
That phone doesn't take anim yet, and I don't think
that would help anyway, because eSIM is more if your
phone is cycling through like no service because it says
it can't find this cards.

Speaker 11 (01:20:00):
Sometimes I leave the SIM card in when I do
each of these to the text sixty seven hundred and
also the reset mobile settings.

Speaker 2 (01:20:07):
Yes, I would leave the SIM card in for both
of those.

Speaker 11 (01:20:09):
So by both these says you know, if you don't
hear from me, then you'll know something happened.

Speaker 1 (01:20:13):
Yeah, if we if no one hears from you again,
then we know you're like stuck somewhere in this world
with l any service.

Speaker 2 (01:20:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 11 (01:20:20):
In that case, hello to your mother for me.

Speaker 1 (01:20:22):
Yeah, and do this in a in an area with
Wi Fi just in case you need to get back
on line.

Speaker 11 (01:20:27):
Okay, right now, So all right, if I switch over
to Wi Fi or just leave it on Wi Fi.

Speaker 2 (01:20:33):
What do you mean switch over to Wi Fi?

Speaker 11 (01:20:35):
Well, I mean it's it's already it's Wi Fi. If
I'm in the house right now, I'm gonna sell you
because I just came from an outsite on hold with
you guys, So I'm gonna obviously hang up with you,
and it should go into Wi Fi.

Speaker 1 (01:20:46):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I would just stay on that
and do that. Do those two things, see what happens.
I think it's going to help you, and hopefully it does.
We'll see what happens. Let me know.

Speaker 2 (01:20:54):
Great, Rich right, Bob, thank everybody? All right?

Speaker 1 (01:20:57):
Eight eight eight rich one O one eight eight eight
seven four four one zero one.

Speaker 2 (01:21:03):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (01:21:04):
Well, well then I guess that sound means it's time
for a break. Uh, Okay, We've got more calls coming up.
I'm gonna tell you that Google Assistant is becoming well,
it's going away. It's becoming something else. I'll explain what's
happening there and when we'll take some more of your calls,
and we have a guest plus the feedback. We got

(01:21:24):
a lot coming up right here on rich On Tech.
Welcome back to rich On Tech. Let's go to uh
Rick in Orange County. Rick, you're on with rich.

Speaker 9 (01:21:37):
Oh hey, rich, thank you for taking my call. I
have a Defender right now my PC laptop and step
for renol. But I'm hardly ever on the PC anymore.
So I just wondering. I gets, like a free.

Speaker 5 (01:21:53):
Virus protection.

Speaker 9 (01:21:54):
Is there one out there that's good?

Speaker 2 (01:21:57):
Well, what do you mean so you're paying for Microsoft to.

Speaker 7 (01:22:01):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (01:22:02):
Okay, so well why not just why not just go
with the Windows security that's built into Microsoft.

Speaker 9 (01:22:11):
Oh I can do that? Yeah do that?

Speaker 1 (01:22:13):
Yeah, just do that. I don't think you need much more.
I mean it's pretty simple. So if you look, if
you go on Defender on your I mean they try
to look. They're trying to sell you, obviously, and I
get it.

Speaker 2 (01:22:26):
It does.

Speaker 1 (01:22:27):
It does more stuff like than just the standard built in.
But you know Windows already has built in virus and
threat detection. So if you if you type in on
your uh Windows Security. So if you type in Windows Security,
you'll see it tells you what's happening. And if you

(01:22:47):
tap virus in threat protection, it'll tell you current threats,
quick scan, no action needed. You can it says security
intelligence when the last time it was updated. Ransomware protection,
you can set that up. I think the main thing
is that you just just you know, get rid of
the other thing, let the let the subscription lapse, and

(01:23:07):
then just activate this and and make sure it's all
up to date and you're good.

Speaker 5 (01:23:13):
Okay, cool, one more time.

Speaker 9 (01:23:15):
What's it called again?

Speaker 1 (01:23:16):
Okay, so it's called Windows Security. So that's it's like
they I think they must have changed the name because
Defender is sort of the uh it looks like the
paid aspect of it, right, that's what you're paying for
right now.

Speaker 2 (01:23:29):
Yeah, so if.

Speaker 1 (01:23:31):
Yeah, well, I mean I get it, you're you know,
it's it's there may be something a little bit more
like it. They're trying to sell on, like the fact
that you can get extra security for different things.

Speaker 2 (01:23:42):
Like let's see what they're selling here.

Speaker 1 (01:23:44):
Uh, let's see it says you can get oh hold on,
I gotta log in, but yeah, okay, protection for Android
iOS Mac and Windows Identity, theft VPN. So if you
don't need all of that stuff, I would say, just
go ahead and get the built in which is just
type in Win Windows Security and make sure that everything's green.
So there's a whole bunch of things that says like

(01:24:05):
virus and threat protection, account protection, firewall, all that stuff.
Just make sure it's good and then I would tap
the virus and threat protection, do a quick scan just
to have a baseline, make sure your computer's good once
you get rid of the other thing, and then just
make sure your security intelligence is up to date.

Speaker 2 (01:24:22):
So that's what I would do.

Speaker 1 (01:24:23):
I mean, you know, there's this big argument over whether
you actually need third party security software, you know for
the Windows computers. So there's a ton of it out there.
It's a big business. Security is very important. But a
couple of things that I think a lot of what
we do nowadays is on the web, and a lot

(01:24:44):
of it is through these web services, and a lot
of those services scan things before they even let them
get to our computer. So unless you're like specifically downloading
something peer to peer or you know, doing something like
that's very much like a off the typical like just
downloading files and things from you know, reputable websites, most

(01:25:06):
of the time they're going to be scanned in some
way before Now, I'm not saying that you should be
off guard. You always need to be on guard, especially
anytime you download something, anytime you install something, anytime you
click a link. But right now, you know, the big
thing is ransomware. That's number one, and identity theft is
number two. So those are the two big things we're
up against.

Speaker 2 (01:25:25):
The viruses.

Speaker 1 (01:25:26):
I mean, yes, there's always going to be viruses out there,
and I think that your computer should be protected against that.
But I think it's being aware of the situation that's better. Now,
for what it's worth, Rick, if you want free software,
free antivirus software above and beyond what Windows gives you,
you can definitely check out a website I like called
av dash test dot org. So av test dot org.

(01:25:53):
They list they do a whole bunch of tests on
these things, and they list the software that they like
in the top free software. It's actually a tie. Let's see,
it's actually a four way tie right now. So a
vast is number one, AVG number two, of youa number three,
and Bitdefender number four. So those are the those are
the products that they rank as kind of the highest

(01:26:16):
and depends.

Speaker 2 (01:26:16):
A vast is the.

Speaker 1 (01:26:17):
Free one, so you know, the other ones may not
be completely free, but a vast you can get for free.
And of course all of these have a paid version
that offers you more. But yeah, good question, Rick, Thanks
for the call.

Speaker 2 (01:26:30):
Appreciate it.

Speaker 1 (01:26:32):
Google assistant is going away. It's becoming Gemini. We all
knew this was going to happen, right. AI is everything.
Everyone's replacing their standard stuff with AI stuff. So Google
put out a blog post saying over the next couple months,
mobile users will be upgraded to Gemini. And before you
get all scared and like, oh my gosh, I don't
want this to happen, I think it's probably a good

(01:26:53):
thing because your phone is going to understand you a
lot more so. Classic Google assistants going away later this year.
It's going to be no longer accessible and most devices
are even available for new downloads. And this is going
to expand beyond just phones. It's gonna be a tablets, cars, headphones, watches,
smart home devices, all this stuff is going to get Gemini.

Speaker 2 (01:27:13):
Why because it's smarter.

Speaker 1 (01:27:15):
You can have a conversation with it in natural language,
and so that's why they're doing this, And of course
AI is the big thing now. The big problem with
replacing Google Assistant with Gemini in the past was that
Assistant did basic things like setting timers, playing music, all
the lock screen stuff. So they had to you know,

(01:27:35):
Gemini was envisioned as an AI chatbot. Now they've kind
of worked in where it can actually perform the functionality
it needs to do on your phone. So we saw
this first with the Samsung S twenty five this year
they had Gemini, a version of Gemini that can also
control the phone and also on the pixels.

Speaker 2 (01:27:55):
It can do a lot of the stuff it needs
to do.

Speaker 1 (01:27:56):
But anyway, now for the other Android phones out there,
you're gonna be Gemini. Don't be scared. I think this
is a good thing. Assistant, by the way, was launched
in twenty sixteen, a couple of years after Siri, which
was twenty eleven. Alexo is twenty fourteen, Gemini the AI
version twenty twenty three, and we all know Siri has
kind of fallen behind, whereas Alexa and Gemini have gotten

(01:28:21):
very very smart in recent years. All Right, coming up,
we're gonna talk to Jared Newman of Advisorator about the
best ad blockers right here on rich on Tech. Welcome
back to rich on Tech. Rich Demiro here hanging out
with you, talking technology the website for the show rich
on Tech dot TV. We've had a great show today.

(01:28:41):
This has been a lot of fun. It's about to
get a lot better too, because Jared Newman is on
the line. He writes a couple of great newsletters. One
is called Advisorator, the other is called cord Cutter Weekly.
And this is the kind of stuff I almost don't
want to share because he does a better job than
I do, and I'm jealous, specifically the cord Cutter Weekly.

(01:29:04):
I'm telling you he I mean, the stuff he covers
and the tips he gives, it's very thorough. So you're
gonna want to sign up for his newsletters. Welcome to
the show, Jared.

Speaker 8 (01:29:13):
Thanks Rich always good to be here. And don't sell
yourself story. I really enjoy your newsletters.

Speaker 2 (01:29:17):
Oh well, thank you.

Speaker 3 (01:29:19):
Well.

Speaker 1 (01:29:19):
I told I had to tell someone the other day
because you know, there's this thing, there's this like fear based,
you know, thing in this world where people don't want
to share people that they see as a competitor or
a threat to them because they're worried that's going to
take away from them. And I tell people, I say, look,
it was a saying I heard many many years ago.
When you light another candle, it does not put yours out.

(01:29:41):
So even though you and I theoretically compete with our newsletters,
which we don't, yours is.

Speaker 2 (01:29:46):
Better anyway, you know, it doesn't.

Speaker 1 (01:29:48):
I'd love promoting yours because it's more access to the
information that you share.

Speaker 2 (01:29:52):
So I'm very happy to do it anyway.

Speaker 1 (01:29:54):
So let's talk about this, this whole ad blocker situation.
I know that Google Chrome has gotten rid of a
popular ad blocker, you block Origin I think it's called
And what's the deal with that?

Speaker 2 (01:30:06):
Why are they doing that?

Speaker 8 (01:30:08):
Yeah, so you block origin is. I always think of
it as just kind of the best ad blocker if
you want to use an ad blocker. The main thing
is that it's it's it just works really well, and
it's very lightweight, and it's free and there's no weird
up cells or subscriptions or anything like that, so it

(01:30:28):
just does what it means. There's been some comparisons of
different ad blockers and how much system resources they use,
and some of them, it's like you're not even better
off in terms of like CPU and battery life than
just not using anything at all. U block Origin is
just top notch as far as all that goes. And
what's happening in Chrome specifically is Google is moving beyond

(01:30:53):
the current platform they use for extensions or moving to
something that extensibly is supposed to improve security, make extensions
more secure. But the short version is that the way
you block Origin works, that's gonna make it impossible for
it to operate. So what they've started doing is they've
started turning off extensions that are affected by this, including

(01:31:14):
you block Origin. You can actually still turn it back on.
It's a little murky as to when you'll eventually not
be able to use it at all, but eventually the
idea is that this will go away and it may
end up affecting other browsers that kind of use the
same underlying code as Chrome. So kind of just keeping
an eye on all that and helping people figure out

(01:31:35):
what to do next.

Speaker 1 (01:31:36):
Well, I guess before we get into your suggestion for
what to do next, I mean, what's the benefit of
an ad blocker Obviously it sounds it sounds mean because
these companies like they make a business on you know,
ads on the website, on the stuff you're reading or
looking at. But what is the benefit of an ad blocker,
because there are some arguments as to why people like them.

Speaker 8 (01:31:56):
Yeah, it's definitely a bit of a gray area. I
think ultimately what it is is like you should be
in charge of like what happens on your computer, right
And the thing is that some of these ads they
can have malware, or they can you know, they can
cover up the whole website so you can't actually see anything,
or they can put a huge drain on your battery life.

(01:32:18):
You know, like if we were listening to your radio
show and it cut to a commercial and you're listening
to the car, you'd appreciate that. You'd be fine with that.
You want to support your radio show. But what if
like it used more gasoline when you were listening to commercials,
you might be like, maybe I want to kind of
block this, you know, So having that option is something
that that you might want to keep in mind.

Speaker 1 (01:32:37):
Maybe if you have an electric car, that might that
might be the case.

Speaker 8 (01:32:40):
You know, you know, you want to you want to
maximize those miles, you know.

Speaker 1 (01:32:44):
So you're putting up the volume and it's like, you know,
the volume is louder on the commercials. Maybe it's using
up more juice. So what is the recommendation? What do
you switch to if if you block Origin is not
working anymore on your browser.

Speaker 8 (01:32:56):
Yeah, so if it comes to that point, you kind
of have to decide if you value you block Origin
more or if you value Chrome more. Because there's other
browsers that have kind of said that they are going
to keep supporting you block Origin in particular, or just
kind of be more accommodating these kind of extensions. So

(01:33:18):
you know, Firefox has kind of come out and said,
we're going to accommodate this older framework of browser extensions.
At least a specific features that you block Origin relies on.
Brave and Opera I believe is said they were going
to have a little carve out for a handful of
ad blockers so that you'll be able to enable them.

(01:33:40):
So you know, there's there's some options like that, And
keep in mind a lot of browsers now have built
in ad blocking capabilities that you can look to instead.
I still kind of feel like you block Origin is
the best without pear, but there's other options to kind
of look to.

Speaker 1 (01:33:58):
Okay, so what what if you want to stick with
you block Origin? They came out with this light version.
Is that just as good?

Speaker 11 (01:34:08):
No?

Speaker 8 (01:34:08):
I mean, look, it is very good. That it's if
it comes down to it and you want to just
still use something, you don't want to change your habits,
you block Origin light is good. It's it's almost as
lightweight as you block Origin proper, and you know it
doesn't have any its own up sells and subscriptions or

(01:34:28):
anything like that. So a lot of the same benefits,
but there's a few trade offs in terms of it
may not work as well. I think there's certain things
that they're not quite able to block as well as
you block Origin does. And then there's sort of some
advanced power user features that I kind of like. There's
something in you you block Origin where you can look
at a web page and say, I don't like this

(01:34:50):
element on the web page. So if you're on Amazon,
you don't like how they show you like the videos
and the ads for other products, you can be like,
zap this out and don't show me this again when
I visit the website. In the future. So there's some
neat things like that that you can do, but you
block Origin Lite is a good fallback if all thus sales.

Speaker 1 (01:35:07):
Any other recommendations besides that, you.

Speaker 8 (01:35:11):
Know, I did talk about we can really talk about Safari,
which doesn't support you block Origin to begin with, and
they have a built in kind of tracking protection that
incidentally ends up hiding some ads. I generally found the
ad guard is decent. They do have some sort of
upselling kind of things you have to be aware of
when you use it, and it's a bit more resource intensive,

(01:35:33):
but that's something to consider. Yeah, I mean, Brave and
Vivaldi have they're built in a AD blocking that you
can kind of look at as well.

Speaker 1 (01:35:43):
My big thing is I noticed a lot of the
websites that you go to if you don't have your
ads you know, blocked, they trick you. You know, like
let's say you go to a software website to like
download a piece of software, Like there will be a
prominent ad on that page that somehow looks like what
you're trying to download, and like you'll click it and
like that's actually advertising and so like in this way,

(01:36:06):
some of these things like actually protect you and you
were talking about malvertizing. That's a big thing too, Like
all those things that like the takeovers on your computer
where it's like your computer is infected, like ninety nine
percent of that is like those takeovers are delivered through
malvertizing where it may only happen for like a couple
of minutes until Google systems figure it out. But it's
like that's delivered through an ad a lot of the time.

(01:36:28):
So these things can actually protect you. All right, Let's
talk about this sign in with Google pop up, because
this happens everywhere I go to red Fan.

Speaker 2 (01:36:36):
It's like, do you want to sign in with Google?

Speaker 1 (01:36:39):
You know, typically I recommend that people always use a
unique password and an a unique log in, just not
to connect everything, you know what I mean?

Speaker 2 (01:36:47):
But how can we get rid of this pop up?

Speaker 8 (01:36:49):
Yeah? So I just got kind of annoyed by this
cause it keeps popping up on different sites that I
go do. Even though I'm kind I'm kind of with you.
I say, not only like a unique password, but a
lot of times I like to use a unique email address,
and there's different services that you can use. You've probably
talked about this email aliases or some people just like
to add a plus sign onto their the end of

(01:37:11):
their Gmail address and another thing, and then that way,
you know, like who's sending You know, if I add
something to the end, I can see, oh, they send
an email to this address, and then you have control
over who's emailing you, right, you know, once you're on
a company's mailing list, ostensibly you can unsubscribe, but you know,
maybe that doesn't work, or maybe you just don't want
to deal with it, or they make it too hard.

Speaker 2 (01:37:31):
Wait, let me tell you.

Speaker 1 (01:37:32):
Let me tell you real quick, how nerdy I am.
So when I used to subscribe to magazines just to
see who sold my my like name and address, I
would sign up using a slightly different variation of my
name so I could tell, like if I did like
rich to Miro, I do like our d E m
U r O. And then all of a sudden, you
start seeing that on your junk mail. You're like, okay, esquire,

(01:37:54):
I see Danie sold my info?

Speaker 2 (01:37:56):
Anyway, keep going exactly.

Speaker 8 (01:37:58):
Yeah, So, I mean Google really wants you to sign
in with them for various reasons. As a look like
you sign in with Google. The way it works is
you click that button if you're already signed into Gmail
or whatever in your web browser, then it just associates
your logging with your Gmail account. You don't have to
set a password, so there is kind of a security
benefit to not having another password to set up, even

(01:38:21):
if you use a password manager. It's something that can't
get lost in a security breach or what have you.
But ultimately, you know, I don't want Google to be
I don't want Google to be like the centerpiece of
my digital life, and I want to be able to
have that control. I don't want my Gmail address to
go out to whoever I subscribe to. So I was
just getting really annoyed by this pop up that is,

(01:38:43):
and to be clear, like this is different from sometimes
you go to a website and there's like sign in
with Facebook, sign in with X, sign in with Google,
those buttons. But this is like if you go to
Reddit when you're not signed in, there's like a big
pop up in it prevents you from using other logging options,
and so I just don't like that, like I want
to have that control. It kind of gets back to

(01:39:04):
the same thing with the ad blockers, like I want
to be in control of what's happening with my computer
and my identity and all of that. So I just
went through and I was like, I'd seen something about
hiding this pop up.

Speaker 2 (01:39:17):
And I got less than a minute, so I gotta,
oh yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:39:19):
Sure, so so yeah, so I found this and then
it went through for basically every web browser and found
ways to disable it.

Speaker 1 (01:39:27):
And so you've got that linked up on the newsletter
Jared Newman dot com Slash Newsletters that'll give you the
sign up for both. But basically I know in Chrome
at least what it's like a flag you gotta do.
It's like a little bit techy, right, you gotta just.

Speaker 8 (01:39:41):
And there's some more technical things for other browsers like Safari,
but I'm nerdy enough that I'm willing to do that
because it's too annoying.

Speaker 1 (01:39:48):
Well, my brother did this too, he texted me. He said,
I did this because he was annoyed by it. So
it's definitely not just you. It's it's but most people
just think you can't change it. And this is why
it's great to subscribe to you a newslet or like Jared's,
because you realize, yes, you have the control. Jared Newman
advisorator Court Cutter Weekly.

Speaker 2 (01:40:06):
Thanks so much.

Speaker 1 (01:40:06):
I'll put a link to your newsletters on the website.
Rich On Tech dot TV. Thanks for joining me. All right,
coming up, we're opening the feedback. Welcome back to rich
On Tech. Let's get right to it, because we've got
so much to get to. First up, before we get
to the feedback. Couple of items of note, digital passport.

(01:40:29):
You can now add your passport to Google Wallet.

Speaker 2 (01:40:33):
So this is new.

Speaker 1 (01:40:34):
It's called an ID pass and you can basically use
your passport at tsa security checkpoints for domestic travel. It
can also act as a real ID, so it does
not replace your physical passport for international travel, but it's
a good thing to have just a backup. And also
if you're traveling within the States. I know, we got

(01:40:55):
to get this real ID soon, so if you're if
you're stalling on that like I am for the past
you know, three or so years, this is a good
thing to have as an alternative because the passport is
kind of like universal.

Speaker 2 (01:41:06):
So if you have a.

Speaker 1 (01:41:07):
Google wallet, you've got a passport, you can now add
it to your Google wallet. Apple does not offer that
at this point, but now that Google does, I'm sure
Apple won't be far behind Nintendo's opening up a new
store in San Francisco. This is their second official US store,
opening up on May fifteenth at Union Square. Like a
lot of the shopping districts in the US, Union Square

(01:41:30):
has been hit hard by the pandemic and other things
going on, So Nintendo store hoping to revive things there.
Of course, if you've been to one of these, I've
been to the one in New York and Tokyo. It's
a fun place, you know, if you like Nintendo, You've
got you know, all kinds of merch, all kinds of games, souvenirs,
lots of photo ops with characters larger than life. They're

(01:41:50):
doing a deal where you can win a prize to
go up there, So if you want to check out that,
I'll link that up on my show Notes Rich on
tech dot TV. But again May fifteenth, San Francisco, Nintendo
opening up a store. All right, let's open up the
feedback now, let's see. Dave writes in, Hey Rich, I've
been watching you since you started on KTLA and you

(01:42:12):
continue to educate your viewers and listeners on what's great
in tech. Your trick to stop scammers is great. I've
passed it along to my kids. He's talking about the
tip I shared on my Instagram about pressing call record.
You can go to my instagram at Ridge on Tech
if you want to see it. I also love how
you plant little pearls in your posts for those who
take the time to read. The pearl in Your last

(01:42:34):
newsletter for me was Rectangle.

Speaker 2 (01:42:35):
Thank you.

Speaker 1 (01:42:36):
I've downloaded it and can already see how it will
improve my photography workflow.

Speaker 2 (01:42:40):
Appreciate all your hard work.

Speaker 1 (01:42:42):
Yes, thank you, Thank you, Dave that I love writing
my newsletter because I sit there and I go, oh,
if people actually take the time to read this, they're
going to get a couple of nuggets out of this
that are really good. And I'm glad that that's not
lost on everyone. It's lost on a lot of people,
but not you, Dave.

Speaker 2 (01:42:57):
Thank you.

Speaker 1 (01:42:59):
Tracy. I'm listening and I just heard the question from
the guy who wanted service out to his fence sixty
plus yards away in his workshop one hundred and fifty
yards away. I've never heard of the two options you
gave him. I'm wondering why he didn't mention starlink. Wouldn't
that solved his issue without all the extra gadgets you
said he needed. Thanks love your show. Great question, Tracy,

(01:43:20):
this was a couple of weeks ago. Yes, Starlink, what
the person was asking for was Wi Fi. He already
had a Wi Fi connection at his house. Starlink provides
a Wi Fi connection in places where there's typically not
a connection. So what he just wanted was his WiFi
that he already has to reach outside to his yard,

(01:43:40):
his fence, and his workshop. So that's why I recommended
the outdoor versions of the I think it was Orb
and Eero, So that's it. Nothing against Starlink. I think
Starlink's amazing, but you need to have a use case scenario.
You don't just buy starlink unless you need it and
you're in an area that's underserved or you want mobile
coverage everywhere.

Speaker 2 (01:44:00):
There you go.

Speaker 1 (01:44:01):
Let's see here, what do we have? Ray from Thousand
Oaks rights in. It's Saturday morning and at ninety two.
I really enjoy your TV show. I'm not super tech savvy,
but I try to keep up. Since I got a
new iPad last year and also new MEC another new
iPad generation, I can't keep up, but I like it.
I'm not a fan of flat, slippery keyboard keys, but
I've learned to deal with them. Adding a mouse sometimes

(01:44:23):
moves my hands on the keyboard, but I've adjusted roxy.
I'm guessing that's his wife is ninety four, enjoys your
show too. She's definitely not into tech, but we both
learn a lot from you.

Speaker 11 (01:44:35):
Ray.

Speaker 2 (01:44:36):
Thank you. This is what I love.

Speaker 1 (01:44:38):
I love when people say I'm not into technology, but
I like your shows, your.

Speaker 2 (01:44:44):
Segments on TV.

Speaker 1 (01:44:45):
That's my whole point to bring technology to everyone because
we're all forced to use it, and by the way,
you should enjoy it if you're using it. Ronald writes
in I've heard you mentioned Rosebud for journaling. I use
another AI journal called mine Sera. It doesn't have a
mobile app, just top, but it's a professional tool with
new features added regularly. Just something your listeners might like
as a comparison listening on Google Home Kfi.

Speaker 2 (01:45:07):
There you go. Let's see here.

Speaker 1 (01:45:11):
Ross from Canada rights in, I was surprised when your
guest said it's illegal to in New York City to
wear headphones while riding a bicycle. I looked it up
and it turns out you are allowed to wear headphones
in one ear, which is the same rule for driving
a car. The law is there to ensure awareness of
your surroundings. Here in Canada, I don't believe we have
any such law as people with hearing laws or impairments

(01:45:31):
are still permitted to drive and ride bicycles.

Speaker 2 (01:45:35):
Good point.

Speaker 1 (01:45:35):
Yeah, most of the time they don't want both ears
taken up by the earbuds, but one ear should be fine.
But I don't think anyone enforces if you're riding a
bike in New York City with your AirPods in. I'm
not sure anyone's ever been arrested for that. I can't
imagine a world where that has happened. That's probably one
of those things that's not really enforced. All right, let's
find one more here before we have to go, Jim says,

(01:45:58):
it's cool. You've read my email about the counting, so
you've read some of my emails before. But this time
it was extra fun because it turned into a whole thing,
even carrying into the next segment. When Adam played the
original Joni Mitchell track as a bumper for a couple
of minutes, I felt like I was part of the show.
I was out on a bike ride in southern California
while listening. It was great to hear thank you, Jim.
Jim has been writing in a lot. Love Jim's comments,

(01:46:20):
but good to feel part of the show. And Tricia says,
I found your show driving home from work one weekend.
I've been a faithful listener ever since. Your tips have
come in handy for my business and personally. Thank you, Tricia.
Next week we're going to talk to the founder of
the death clock app. Yeah, it uses AI to predict
how long you live. Is it bogus or is it real?

(01:46:40):
He'll explain, I think it's real.

Speaker 2 (01:46:42):
That's going to do it.

Speaker 1 (01:46:43):
You can find links to what I mentioned on the
website rich on Tech dot tv. I'm on social media
at rich on Tech. Thanks so much for listening. Thanks
to everyone who makes this show possible. Kim for appearing
this week on the air, Bobo behind the board. I'll
talk to you real soon.

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Host

Rich DeMuro

Popular Podcasts

Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang

40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season

Crime Junkie

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Best Ways to Transcribe Audio, Spring Cleaning Your PC & AT&T’s New "Landline"